Comment by whartung

Having a high level I/O processor chip would be a nice thing to have for the vintage market.

Something akin to what the CH376 does to make it easy to attach DOS based USB storage, but something that goes further. Like easy to be a generic USB host rather than something dedicated like the CH376 is.

Something that gives you an 8-bit bus to SPI and I2C and Ethernet/WiFi etc. SPI is trivial, but bit banging it with an 8-bit CPU is glacial. UARTs are faster.

A regular RPi would work, just that the idea of having to boot Linux on my "I/O processor" makes me itch. I'm sure you can go bare metal.

And, sure "what's the point", but I just view the I/O Super Co-processor in the same vein as a SCSI controller chip. Simple protocol to the chip, and the chip does the heavy lifting of the actual SCSI bus.

This chip does more heavy lifting.