Those "other" MCU's may be OK, but they're not fast enough to do a lot of good in monitoring the signals on an MCU.

IF the thing were running at 30 MIPS, maybe it would have the potential to do some good, but even so, triggering on a complex sequence wouldn't be easy.

You have to be able to run a loop that's something on the order of

store inputs in sample buffer
increment pointer into buffer
compare with the current trigger component register
if equal, then incrememt pointer to next trigger component
fetch next trigger component into trigger component register
if the buffer is full and the last trigger component was found, stop, else keep sampling until stopped
or trigger is satisfied and buffer is full
now transfer buffer content to display device and indicate whether trigger was found/completed.

Well, you get the idea ... this sort of thing has to cycle at twice the desired sample rate. That means that the MCU has to operate at about 25x the sample rate if the MCU in question is a "one-clocker."

If the thing's so slow that you could count it on your fingers, what use is the hardware?

RE