Thanks Chuck. It's always worth adding some context, to help with search and to indicate why it would be worth clicking through:

Surface mount, 2d graphics (and touch, and audio) to drive LCD panel
Store up to 2000 objects in 8k byte display list (no direct frame buffer access, probably)
SPI or I2C interface to system microcontroller
Just announced, expected to be available in "mass market" later in 2013



Cheers
Ed

Looks cool, but I wonder about the business case. We're getting to the point where a 'low cost mcu' can do all of that stuff in software.

You could think of this as a way to sell a software library, perhaps. What people want is a quick, reliable and cheap way to their market.

I don't know much about the chip, but from an MCU point of view, I imagine the command set is pretty simple and the SPI interface makes it particularly easy to interface. But how does it contrast with that Parallax VGA chipset. I imagine it has a bit more sophisticated geometry model and more features (rotating text and fonts notably).

Is video and audio in software that ubiquitous today to make something like this uninteresting considering the (envisioned) simplicity of wiring this up to the MCU as well as the other apparent feature set?

It looks like it has quite powerful hardware inside. For me, it doesn't make much sense to take an underpowered CPU, and hook it up to powerful hardware to drive video (causing extra complications because user interface is now distributed, and forced to go through a thin pipe). Why not take a more powerful CPU, e.g. the broadcom SoC that powers the raspberry pi, and use it directly ? You get more flexibility, easier design, large existing set of tools and support, better guarantee of long term support, and most likely, a better overall price.

That Broadcom SoC seems to be leading edge. I think it's competitor might be the AllWinner Tech A10. I got a tablet as a gift and the touchscreen recently cracked, so I took it apart and found a surprisingly small IC count. The A10 was there at the center.

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65Org16:https://github.com/ElEctric-EyE/verilog-6502

The Allwinner Tech A10 looks pretty advanced to me. The development boards look advanced to me.