
86 Chapter 2 CPUs
implications for
CPUs
To take advantage of the available parallelism in multimedia and other
embedded applications, we need to match the processor architecture to the appli-
cation characteristics. These experiments suggest that processor architectures
must exploit parallelism at several levels of abstraction.
Because so many embedded systems must meet real-time deadlines, predictable
execution time is a critical feature of the components used in them. However,
traditional computer architecture designs have emphasized average performance
over worst-case performance, producing processors that are fast on average but
whose worst-case per ...