So I missed this one until yesterday, when Dave Voyles of Microsoft tweeted it out. While the video was published in 2011, it doesn't have too many views and this topic only gets better with age (pretty much).

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Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons

The narrator opens up a Super Nintendo, which is a PAL kit for North Americans wondering why the casing looks so different. The console has a dedicated CPU, RAM, two sound processors with RAM, and a four-package video chipset of two graphics chips and two VRAM packages. The two video chips, each paired with a package of RAM, are used in tandem but apparently cannot see into each others memory. This reminds me of the split-memory architecture on the PS3, which provides 256MB to the Cell processor and 256MB to the NVIDIA GPU.

Another interesting note is that, because the sound system has its own 8-bit Sony processor, sound effects and music will continue to play when the main system freezes. I never really thought about it until I watched this video, but I believe I've actually experienced that a few times in the early/mid 90s. I just never thought much about it because computers were still somewhat magical back then.