real-time is about maximum-bounded response time.... not performance. an i7 in this case will be significantly worse than a Cortex-M0. Entirely due to the feat

real-time is about maximum-bounded response time.... not performance. an i7 in this case will be significantly worse than a Cortex-M0. Entirely due to the features in the i7 that make it high performance, such as instruction reordering, branch prediction, etc. All those types of features make the performance less deterministic.