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In contrast to general-purpose computers, microcontrollers used in embedded systems often seek to minimize interrupt latency over instruction throughput.
When an electronic device causes an interrupt, the intermediate results, the registers, have to be saved before the software responsible for handling the interrupt can run, and then must be put back after it is finished. If there are more registers, this saving and restoring process takes more time, increasing the latency.
Low-latency MCUs generally have relatively few registers in their central processing units, or they have “shadow registers”, a duplicate register set that is only used by the interrupt software.

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