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Super FX
From SnesLab
Super FX is a Super NES enhancement chip developed by Argonaut Games and Nintendo. It's also known as the "Graphical Support Unit" (short for "GSU") for its greater graphical capabilities compared to the S-CPU whereas its first revision, used for Star Fox, uses the name "Mathematical, Argonaut, Rotation, & Input/Output" or short MARIO chip. It also is know for the use in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.
During this article, GSU refers to Super FX whereas CPU refers to the Super NES CPU.
Features
The embedded co-processor has got a base clock speed of 10.74 MHz which is four times as fast as the S-CPU which uses a base block of 2.68 Mhz. Its features includes but not limited to:
- A RISC-like processor where most opcodes have an instruction size of one byte and are executed in a single cycle when in cache.
- 512 bytes of cache RAM for faster processing of instructions.
- A large memory capactiy, a total capacity of 8 MiB ROM, of which two MiB are shared by CPU and GSU, and 256 KiB RAM, of which 128 KiB are shared by CPU and GSU.
- A separate bus for ROM and RAM to handle memory in parallel
- Paralell processing with the CPU
- Fast Bitmap to Planar conversion
- Pipeline processing to fetch opcodes twice as fast, effectively increasing the processing speed to 21.48 MHz.