Editing Barrel processor (section)

===Advantages===

A single-tasking processor spends a lot of time idle, not doing anything useful whenever a [[cache miss]] or [[pipeline stall]] occurs. Advantages to employing barrel processors over single-tasking processors include:
* The ability to do useful work on the other threads while the stalled thread is waiting.
* Designing an ''n''-way barrel processor with an ''n''-deep [[Instruction pipeline|pipeline]] is much simpler than designing a single-tasking processor because a barrel processor never has a [[pipeline stall]] and doesn't need [[Hazard (computer architecture)#Register forwarding|feed-forward]] circuits.
* For [[real-time computing|real-time]] applications, a barrel processor can guarantee that a "real-time" thread can execute with precise timing, no matter what happens to the other threads, even if some other thread [[Deadlock (computer science)|locks up]] in an [[infinite loop]] or is [[interrupt storm | continuously interrupted]] by [[hardware interrupt]]s.