That's correct, if you match the burst count (and data width) of the DMA to the SDRAM then you should be able to avoid burst adapters between the DMA and SDRAM. You would however end up with a burst adapter between the DMA and on-chip RAM since that memory is not burst capable.
The modular SGDMA was designed with this in mind:
- ease of use
- support large transfer sizes and data widths
- support customization to the control plane (i.e. you can replace the dispatcher for your own controller)
- capable of pre-fetching descriptors from memory by simply adding a pre-fetch block in front of the dispatcher (one of these days I'll build one...)
- use a smaller logic and memory footprint
- achieve higher throughput and fmax
- easily support video, Ethernet, PCIe, etc... types of applications
I would say the disadvantage of the modular SGDMA over the regular SGDMA are:
- lack for descriptor pre-fetching from memory
- lack of a full blown HAL driver
There might be more but nothing comes to mind.