HoloLens secret sauce: A 28nm customized 24-core DSP engine built by TSMC
For those who haven't had the pleasure: developing on Tensilica Xtensa cores generally means living within 128-256KB of directly-accessible memory; a windowed register file that makes writing your own exception handlers "interesting"; a 6-year-old GCC bolted to a proprietary backend; per-seat licensing fees to use the compiler; and a corporate owner that's only halfway interested in the ecosystem they now control.<p>So yeah, kind of wishing it would just die and let ARM take over the embedded space.