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Smart controllers

I guess that some controllers will require nothing but logic circuits; that is maybe the case of an UART. Others, however, will need some intelligence; perhaps disks and printers will fall into this group.

In any case, the amount of resources needed (such as registers and arithmetic units) would not be too large and, for the other part, a dedicated computer (optimized for the task) would be the optimal choice as opposite of a general purpose one.

I can think for instance in a simple 8-bits CPU with an accumulator, a program counter and some other specialized registers (as opposite of general-purpose registers) with an ALU capable of just the few operations required for that specific application.

But must interesting of all is the fact that a Von Newman architecture is far from optimal for this "low profile" smart peripheral controller I thinking in.