Virtual Mobile Engine

The VME appears to be one half of Sony's "Virtual Mobile Engine Concept 2" where a CPU would take care of "lightweight control tasks" and reconfigurable hardware logic (the VME) would do all of the "heavy work in a power efficient manner". See Virtual Mobile Engine - LSI that "Changes its Spots".

It might be something like a reconfigurable DSP; noone has been able to interpret its "firmware" yet. It can be accessed from the ME through the mfvme/mtvme instructions or through DMA with addresses from 0x440F8000 to 0x44100000 (excluded).

Features

• Works as Dynamic Reconfigurable vector engine
• Reconfigured on the fly
• One cycle context switch
• Coarse grain heterogeneous type
• Native 24bit data-width
• Max Clock Freq. 166MHz

Chip Layout

___________________128bit BUS_____________________
       /\
       ||
|------||----------------------------------------|
| |----\/---|         VME     |---------------|  |
| |   Bus   |                 |               |  |
| |Interface|                 | Local Memory  |  |
| |         |<--------------->|               |  |
| |         |                 |----/\------/\-|  |
| |  DMAC   |                      ||      ||    |
| |         |   |---------|   |----||---|  ||    |
| |         |   |         |-->|Address  |  ||    |
| | Control |-->| Context |   |Generator|  ||    |
| |Registers|   |Registers|   |---------|  ||    |
| |---------|   |         |                ||    |
|               |         |   |------------\/--| |
|               |         |-->|                | |
|               |---------|   | Reconfigurable | |
|                             |    Datapath    | |
|                             |----------------| |
|------------------------------------------------|