How many computers are in your computer? (2021)
This reminds me of my Amiga 2000, because it's the first time I became fascinated by the number of extra CPUs, because my A2000 setup was a bit weird.<p>It had of course its main CPU, the 68000, and its CPU like copper. But it also had a 6502 compatible CPU controlling the keyboard. Then I put a SCSI controller in it that had a Z80 on it. And a 68020 accelerator board. Then I added a Janus PC card (the A2000 had an ISA bus in addition to the native bus and a Janus card let you run x86 PC software in a window on your Amiga desktop) with a 8086. Lastly I added a 286 accelerator to the PC side.<p>Of course the original 68000 and 8086 were not active, but having 4 processor families in a single box was fun.<p>Of course, this whole using Turing complete chips or whole CPUs other places than the main CPU is a much older thing. E.g. Commodore designs "borrowed" this from bigger computer systems when they put fully programmable 6502 based computers in their external floppy drives for their 8-bit line (you can load code into the memory of the 1541 floppy drive and execute it)<p>The number of CPUs took a temporary dip in the PC world for a while with e.g. increasing use of dumb IDE controllers instead of SCSI controllers which at the time often had CPUs/microcontrollers on them. But it didn't take long before the upward trend in number of CPUs resumed.