>>135019
thx

god, now I am reminded:
what the fuck was Sega even on when they added the SH-1 CPU for handling the CD drive

almost every other chip I can think of has a good reason, even if a more sensible design would have made cuts
two SH-2s utilizes the master-slave feature and adds a bit of processing power, the 68k for sound is an extremely standard design of the time, the DSP for handling 3D calcs... well, it would have made sense in 1992/3/4 when they were designing the thing, it's only dumb in hindsight since that was the kind of thing they threw in their arcade boards for the job
the two graphics processors aren't a particularly great design, but it isn't that hard to imagine Sega managing to combine them into one chip that does both jobs

but the SH-1 in the CD drive block is a full fucking 20MHz CPU that is basically a slightly earlier revision of the main CPUs and I cannot imagine this made each Saturn any cheaper to produce regardless of how good of a deal Sega got from Hitachi
and it is not user programmable at all, it strictly runs the CD handling program, so you can't even be like
"YEAH I GOT 3 CPUS BIIIIITCH"

it just doesn't work like that

maybe sega was retarded before 1994
since 1992/1993 is when a lot of these decisions would be getting made