What are some practical reasons you might choose one state machine over the other?
In practice, the difference between Moore and Mealy in most situations is not very important. However, when you’re trying to optimize the design in certain ways, it sometimes is.
Generally speaking, a Mealy machine can have fewer state variables than the corresponding Moore machine, which will save physical resources on a chip. This can be important in low-power designs.
On the other hand, a Moore machine will typically have shorter logic paths between flip-flops (total combinatorial gate delays), which will enable it to run at a higher clock speed than the corresponding Mealy machine.
