Researchers have demonstrated that the RP2040's DMA (Direct Memory Access) system is Turing complete, meaning it can perform any computation that a general-purpose computer can. By creatively using the DMA controller's memory-copy capabilities and transport-triggered operations, they built a complete computing system independent of the main ARM CPUs, capable of executing about 8 million DMA blocks per second. This work builds on previous research showing how memory-move operations can be used to create general-purpose computation.
Background
The RP2040 is a microcontroller chip developed by Raspberry Pi, featuring a dual-core ARM Cortex-M0+ processor and 12 DMA channels. DMA (Direct Memory Access) is a feature that allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory independently of the CPU, improving data transfer efficiency.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Jun 4, 2026 at 07:02 PM
- Score
- 7.0 / 10