Imagine the dealer in a game of blackjack. The dealer has to pass
out cards to the players around the table, and also has to be
responsive to input from those players ("hit me"), which can
affect the order of the card distribution.
The FSA is obviously the dealer in this analogy. What makes
it different than the zillion other cores that are out there?
First, the FSA is
optimized to be the
fastest
dealer in the business.
One way to take advantage of its speed is to have a game with only
smart players. That is to say in a friendly game, the dealer might
offer some advice from time to time ("Should I stay on 16?"), but
this just slows down play while the dealer has to respond.
When the FSA is the 'dealer', the 'players' should definitely have
the primary responsibility for their own play.
To begin to stretch the blackjack analogy, it can also be said that
the FSA is also the dealer with
the most cards.
Within its instruction
set's addressing range, the architecture can pass to IP subsystems
a plethora of information over multiple paths. Again, it all comes
down to what a computer design is optimized for. Not only is the FSA
a Control Architecture, but the control is fast and ... dense.
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