Intel's x86 microprocessors can automatically manage tasks just like a simple operating system. There are many tricks and pitfalls, however, but with the right approach the programmer can get great performance at zero cost.
Just about every embedded system does some sort of task switching or task management. You don't always have to use a full-size operating system or RTOS to do task management; sometimes a little kernel executive is enough or even a quick time-slice interrupt. In the extreme case, you don't need any software at all: the processor can manage tasks for you. In this article, we'll drill into the x86 task-management features.
Hardware task-management started with the '386 and continues to this day on chips like the old '486 and Pentium as well as the newer Athlon, Opteron, and Pentium 4 processors. It's a terrific feature for embedded systems programmers because it makes task management fairly simple and foolproof. Whether you're managing just two tasks or dozens, you can probably let the chip do it all for you—for free.
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