ABSTRACT

These characteristics are judged relative to the embedded software they are expected to run. A processor may exhibit very different performance or energy consumption on different applications.

RISC processors are commonly used in embedded computing. ARM2 and MIPS3 processors are examples of RISC processors that are widely used in embedded systems. A RISC CPU uses a pipeline to increase CPU performance. Many RISC instructions take the same amount of time to execute, simplifying performance analysis. However, many RISC architectures do have exceptions to this rule. An example is the multiple-register feature of the ARM processor: an instruction can load or store a set of registers, for which the instruction takes one cycle per instruction.