John.Maloney at disney.com is widely believed to have written:

> What's the "mini cache"? Is it built into the SA1110 chip? How
> does one enable it?
It's a small extra memory cache (I think for data only) that was
provided exactly for situations like updating displays. If your software
can use it (and I have no idea whatsoever how one would do that - offer
me enough money and I'll work it out :-) ) then you don't have to smash
the main cache by copying through it. I'm not sure but I think it is a
rework of an idea we had back in 89 when working on the ARM 2as for the
Active Book machine, which previously had no cache at all and so we
added 256 words on chip to speed up things like.... display updating!

It's not so much that it speeds up the pixel copying (though it can help
with read-mutate-write-to-display) as that it prevents the flooding of
the main cache and subsequent slowdown.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- Always loses battles of wits because he's unarmed.