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Comment by bhewes | Hacker News Reader

The Playstation 4 does this as the south bridge is really just an ARM chip. So I think you are right.

And the PS3 before it. And the WiiU, and the Wii. And every AMD chip since about 2013 (AMD Platform Security Processor, their equivalent of Intel's ME).

Honestly, pretty much every complex electronic device (and quite a few not so!) out there has a bunch of ARMs inside of it doing system management. This is borderline a non-story IMO.

Hell, an ARM7TDMI was a pretty common core to use on SD cards a few years back. The damn things are everywhere.

> ARM7TDMI was a pretty common core to use on SD cards

Which is crazy, because that was the main CPU in the GameBoy Advance.

The PS4 southbridge has 256MB of RAM, runs FreeBSD, and downloads game patches and such. This seems far more ambitious than a BMC/ME.

Anyone interested in this should watch the CCC talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AoHGJ1g9aM

Yeah dude that talk was awesome.

Direct video link: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7946-console_hacking_2016

The uploader seems to have recorded themselves playing the video and it's missing the start and has buffering issues,

Not really, the ARM in the SB is much more like a ILOM system; not much different from the various processors scattered around hardware these days, be it ARM or some other more niche architecture, or even special-purpose archs.

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