
2.3 RISC Processors and Digital Signal Processors 69
common in linear algebra. Multithreading is a fine-grained concurrency mech-
anism that allows the processor to quickly switch between several threads of
execution.
2.2.3 Embedded versus General-Purpose Processors
General-purpose processors are just that—they are designed to work well in a
variety of contexts. Embedded processors must be flexible, but they often can be
tuned to a particular application. As a result, some of the design precepts that are
commonly followed in the design of general-purpose CPUs do not hold for
embedded computers. In addition, given the large number of embedded comput- ...