[phendrenad2]

I guess technically a CPU core within the GPU ASIC block loads code into the main CPU. What a weird design. Feels like the kinda of things that Wozniak would come up with to shave cost from the Apple Macintosh.

[djmips]

AFAIK Woz only really worked on Apple II and Apple /// but his Apple II disk drive controller lived on and was included in the Mac.

[Findecanor]

Woz also designed Apple Desktop Bus for keyboards and mice. First used on the Apple IIGS, and then on Macs from Macintosh II onwards up until it was replaced by USB.

[namibj]

Ehhh, video core is basically just a (iirc multi-core/-thread) vector processor. Funnily enough, this also makes these rather cheap number crunching hard real time chips with the high-bandwidth IO (for hard-real-time) of a Pi. Notably, it's camera/display interfaces.

[codedokode]

Could it be a protection of IP? This way program on main CPU cannot access initialization code and the user cannot learn how to do it.

[dezgeg]

Doesn't really help when the VC firmware is loaded from the SD card anyways