Question

Differentiate general purpose processor, single purpose processor and ASIC with respect to design matrix, with suitable example.

Answer 1

General purpose processor

• General purpose processor is a Programmable device.
  
• General purpose processor used in microprocessor.
  
• General purpose processor have general data path with large register file.
  
• General purpose processor have general ALU.
  
• General purpose processor take less time to market.
  
• General purpose processor have low NRE cost.
  
• General purpose processor have high flexibility.
  
• General purpose processor is use for variety of applications.
  
• It is manufactured in large scale. 
  
• Performance is not high.
  
• Size of general purpose processor is large.
  
• So its efficiency is less.
  
• Design cost and time of general purpose processor is low.
  
• It perform variety of computation and consists of arithmetic and logic units (ALUs).
  
• General purpose processor is use in laptop or desktop.
  
• General purpose processor have the largest flexibility.
  
• Example for general purpose processor is Pentium.
  

Single purpose processor

• Single purpose processor is a Digital circuit which designed to execute exactly one program.
  
• In single purpose processor no program memory is required.
  
• Single purpose processor is fast.
  
• Single purpose processor consume low power.
  
• Single purpose processor have small memory.
  
• Single purpose processor is design to execute only one program.
  
• It perform particular computation task.
  
• So it have faster performance.
  
• Size of single purpose processor is small.
  
• Power consumption is low.
  
• Size is small means it have less multiplexers.
  
• No program memory.
  
• Coprocessor, Floating point processing and peripherals are the examples of single purpose processor.
  
• The datapath contains only required components.
  
• Example for single purpose processor is accelerator or peripheral.
  

Application specific processor

• Application specific processor is the compromise between general purpose and single purpose processor.
  
• Application specific processor have Programmable memory.
  
• Application specific processor optimise for a particular class of application having common characteristics.
  
• Application specific processor have optimised data path.
  
• Application specific processor have a special unit function.
  
• Application specific processor have some flexibility.
  
• Application specific processor have good performance, size, and power.
  
• It is designed for specific application.
  
• ASIP have good flexibility with good performance.
  
• It have low cost and low power consumption.
  
• So efficiency is high.
  
• Embedded microcontrollers, network processor and digital signal processor are the types of Application Specific Instruction Set Processor (ASIP).
  
• It have higher computational speed.
  
• And higher datapath utilization due to programmability.
  
• Examples of application specific processor are embedded microcontroller, network processor and DSP.