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That really is the worst possible DMA engine. Given how those tiny cortex M0s rely on DMA to get pretty much everything done, it is confusing why atmel put a basically useless DMA engine in place.

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It is OK-ish if you just want to move one thing into one unit, past that it quickly becomes useless and doing PIO becomes faster ...

- am author but HN is limiting how fast i can reply :(

Those chips generally have on-board RAM, so accessing it 14 times isn't much of a big deal. This DMA engine can be fed very quickly (in core clock cycles) if you are doing several DMA transfers at a time: write out all the descriptors to RAM and then just go one pointer at a time.

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