> VIA processors are renowned for their low power usage and excellence in embedded designs; we believe that the functionality described was created in good faith as a useful feature for the embedded market, and was unintentionally left enabled on some early generations of the processor.
I could see using a secondary core as a watchdog in an embedded environment-- if something went too wrong, perhaps the secondary CPU can either get some valuable logging data or stuff the system with code designed to restore it to a controllable state.
What is the use of this feature?