General Purpose Processors

A general purpose processor is a programmable device that is suitable for a variety of applications.The most important feature of these processors is program memory,that means the designer of such processors does not know what program will run on that processor,so the program cannot be built into the digital circuit.Another important feature of these processors is general datapath that means the datapath must be general enough to handle a variety of computations,so such a datapath typically has a large register file and one or more general purpose arithmetic logic units(ALUs).An embedded system designer,however need not be concerned about the design of general purpose processor.An embedded system designer simply uses a general purpose processor,by programming the processor's memory to carry out the required functionality.Using a general purpose processor in an embedded system may result in several design benefits.