CISC, Risc and DSP Processors in Real-Time Signal Processing and Control

This paper presents an investigation into the nature of advanced high performance complex instruction set computer (CISC) processors, reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors and digital signal processing (DSP) devices. Several DSP and control algorithms of regular and irregular nature are considered to explore the real-time characteristics of the different processors. The algorithms are implemented on several CISC, RISC and DSP processors. The hardware and software resources and capabilities of the processors and the characteristics of the algorithms are discussed to provide a matching between the algorithms and the architectures. Finally, a comparison of the results of the implementations is made, on the basis of real-time computation performance, to lead to merits of development of fast processing techniques for real-time DSP and control applications.