What are some practical reasons you might choose one state machine over the other?
Usually, the key distinguishing feature of a DSP when compared with a general-purpose CPU is that the DSP can execute certain signal-processing operations with few, if any, CPU cycles wasted on instructions that do not compute results.
One of the most basic operations in many key DSP algorithms is the MAC (multiply-accumulate) operation, which is the fundamental step used in matrix dot and cross products, FIR and IIR filters as well as FFTs. A DSP will typically have a register and/or memory organization and a data path that allows it to do at least 64 MAC operations (and often many more) on unique data pairs in a row without any clocks wasted on loop overhead or data movement. General-purpose CPUs do not generally have enough registers to accomplish this without using additional instructions to move data between registers and memory.
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