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by tenebrisalietum 1253 days ago
- the embedded controller (EC)

- the CPU core in the chipset that runs the ME/PSP

- if the TPM is not an fTPM, it has a CPU I'm sure.

- if your NIC has offload engines, it has a CPU or two.

- each storage device has a CPU.

- each Wi-Fi device has a CPU.

- thunderbolt controller takes firmware, it has a CPU. I'd bet USB3 and 4 do too.

- any USB device has a CPU on the other end accepting and interpreting commands.

- same with any SCSI device.

- monitors have a CPU or two, one for the OSD settings and another to drive the display I'm sure.

- I think any nVidia or AMD graphics card has a CPU in there (in addition to the GPU).

- The following portable media has microcontroller firmware: SD cards, Memory Stick. (The now defunct SmartMedia and Olympus XD were raw NAND).

- your optical mouse has a CPU as well to process optical data.

- obviously printers have CPUs and firmware, probably separate ones for the web UI and the part that drives the actual print mechanism, and I'd bet a separate one for scanning and image processing.

- any keyboard has a microcontroller and firmware (there are open source keyboard firmwares)

- SIM cards for cellular connections have their own CPU and firmware.
3 comments
Dork1234 1253 days ago
Apple laptop chargers had a 16bit MSP430 microcontroller in them, the same performance as original Macintosh.

Apple Thunderbolt Cables have a ARM chip on each end of the connector.

Every Intel CPU has atleast one smaller x86 core that isn't visible to the user that is running MINIX.This CPU is responsible for MicroCode updates.

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Gordonjcp 1253 days ago
> obviously printers have CPUs and firmware

Famously Apple's first laser printer had a faster 68000 than the Mac it connected to.

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uticus 1253 days ago
forgot memory controller

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_controller

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tenebrisalietum 1253 days ago
> Memory controllers contain the logic necessary to read and write to DRAM, and to "refresh" the DRAM. Without constant refreshes, DRAM will lose the data written to it as the capacitors leak their charge within a fraction of a second (not more than 64 milliseconds according to JEDEC standards).

Do they use CPUs now?

I did hear that IBM was developing serial RAM (not NVRAM) with an onboard controller on the memory modules - with the need for firmware. Beyond that I didn't think memory controllers ran instructions from ROM or other instruction storage like a CPU.

As far as flash memory, they definitely use a CPU and that's what I meant by "storage" in my list. :)

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