I suspect a fair amount of hard real time applications are not running on 3GHz CPUs. A 100MHz CPU (or lower) without an MMU or FPU is probably more representati

I suspect a fair amount of hard real time applications are not running on 3GHz CPUs. A 100MHz CPU (or lower) without an MMU or FPU is probably more representative. But it's not really so much about being fast, it's about being able to guarantee that your system can respond to an event within a given amount of time every time. (At least that is how a friend who works in embedded/real time explained it to me.)