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> Embedded computing is still huge and has drastically different performance requirements

Even chips as small Cortex-M4 has a write buffer, 3-stage pipeline and branch speculation. And real embedded computing is more and more utilizing hardware similar to desktop/mobile/server. You can't run self-driving car / neural networks / image processing on a single threaded CPU with no cache or branch prediction.

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Cache is part of TAOCP

As to the rest of it. It's much cheaper to use a GPU style massive array of dumb cores vs. a few faster cores. Don't forget car companies are spending billions on these chips so spending a little more on software to save a lot on hardware is a good tradeoff.

You can't run the car on it, but many subsystems in any car, automatic or not, can and will run on that sort of machine.

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