alt Hacker NewsEven desktop and smartphone platforms come with MCU grade co-processors these days for low level tasks like power and sleep management.
Even desktop and smartphone platforms come with MCU grade co-processors these days for low level tasks like power and sleep management.
Interrupts trash high end cores throughput and they have high latency and non deterministic execution times. Smaller cores like an Cortex-M series handle interrupts quickly and deterministically. And they are very power efficient.
That was a gut feel of mine 30 years ago. And it wasn't as bad then.
Newer gut feel but I remember a processor designer saying the same thing a few years ago. Modern systems the processor very often is doing basically jack all nothing 95% of the time. They aren't very power efficient in that mode. Where Cortex-M processors are.
A soft poke. An Arm Cortex-M4 is as powerful as an 486 of yore that was what people were running windows 3.1 on and playing DOOM.