Chapter 3. Hardware Architecture
The software engineer for a real-time system should not ask how fast a processor can go, but how much it can be slowed down by unfortunate circumstances. From this point of view, it is unfortunate that modern processor architecture optimizes for throughput. It makes excellent sense for most systems to trade a rare factor of 100 slowdown for a performance doubling everywhere else.
This design philosophy is a major part of the reason you are probably using a desktop computer several hundred times faster than a departmental minicomputer built ten years ago, but it leaves real-time programs with a choice of obsolete processors ...
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