Akiko is a custom chip used in the Amiga CD32

Amiga CD32

The Amiga CD32, styled "CD32" , was the first 32-bit CD-ROM based video game console released in western Europe, Australia, Canada and Brazil. It was first announced at the Science Museum in London, United Kingdom on 16 July 1993, and was released in September of the same year...

 games console and forms part of the AGA

Advanced Graphics Architecture

Advanced Graphics Architecture is the third generation Amiga graphic chip set, first used in the Amiga 4000 in 1992. AGA was codenamed the Pandora chipset by Commodore International internally....

 chipset used in that system. Akiko is responsible for implementing system glue logic, some of the control logic for the CD32's CD-ROM

CD-ROM

A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....

 controller, and controlling the serial ('AUX') port .

Additionally, the Akiko chip is able to perform 'chunky' to 'planar' graphics conversion in hardware. The Amiga's native display is a planar display which is simple and efficient to manipulate for routines like scrolling. However, chunky displays are faster and more efficient for 3D graphics manipulation. Akiko allows this conversion to be performed in hardware instead of relying on software conversion which would cause more overhead

Computational overhead

In computer science, overhead is generally considered any combination of excess or indirect computation time, memory, bandwidth, or other resources that are required to attain a particular goal...

. The conversion works by writing 32 chunky pixels to Akiko's registers and reading back eight 32-bit words of converted planar data which can then be copied to the display buffer.