I think it's really useful on 'big' MCU, like the raspberry pi. There exists an entire real time spirit there, where you don't really use the CPU to do any bit

I think it's really useful on 'big' MCU, like the raspberry pi. There exists an entire real time spirit there, where you don't really use the CPU to do any bit banging but everything is on time as seen from the outside. You have timers that receive the quadrature encoders inputs, and they just send interrupt when they wrap, the GPIO system can be plugged to the DMA, so you can stream the memory to the output pins without involving the CPU (again, interrupts at mid-buffer and empty buffer). You can stream to a DAC, stream from a ADC to memory with the DMA. A lot of that stuff bypasses the caches to get a predictable latency.