I wonder how this affected Toshiba's own processors -- MeP, then Cell. Some of MPEs (Nuon's processing units) only had access to its small local memory and needed DMA to access the main memory. This is kind of similar to Cell's SPEs. Each SPE has only 256 KB of directly accessible memory and required DMA to get to the main memory. You can say it's not uncommon in DSPs, but it's still interesting Toshiba has been involved with these.