GENERAL PURPOSE PROCESSOR:
The designer of a general purpose processor builds a programmable device suitable for a variety of applications.
One feature of such a processor is a program memory the designer of such a processor does not know about what program will run on the processor, so the program cannot be built into a digital circuit.
Another feature is a general data path – the data path must be general enough to handle a variety of computations, so such a data path typically has a large register file and one or more general purpose ALU’s. An embedded system designer however need not be concerned about its design. He simply programs it to carry out required functionality. Hence it is referred as a software portion.
