MSX Engine vs Apple M1

This blog is interesting. He looks for Toshiba's msx engine in Toshiba word processors.

Though Apple uses "unified memory" to mean both that the RAM is on the package and that both the GPU and CPU use the same physical pool, whereas the MSX is notable for being a rare 8-bit exception to the latter sort of unification.

SoCs usually don't include RAM; e.g. the one on the Raspberry Pi doesn't, and neither do any of the various MSX-Engines. Apple's is part of the much smaller group that includes the RAM.

Which may be why Apple's top-of-the-range Mac Pro is still sporting an Intel processor at the time of writing, something like 2.5 years after Apple's computer SoC debut.

EDIT: bit of a digression, but the first ARM SoC that I'm aware of is 1992's ARM250, which was used in at least one Archimedes.

Yeah, definitely. And this is the computer science way. We could probably get into a never-ending debate on whether there's a real distinction between microcontrollers and SoCs and, if so, exactly which chips go into which bucket, if we wanted. But who has the energy?

My experience with an M1 has certainly been flawless, but I happen to be exactly in the target market — completely unaffected by the RAM limits, the screen limits, etc, that tend to feature in a lot of the justified criticism. Apple clearly knows what it wants to build.