Temporal multithreading

Also known as super-threading, the main subtypes for temporal multithreading (TMT) are coarse-grained and fine-grained (or interleaved). The former switches rapidly between different tasks, saving the context of each before switching to another task's context. The latter type switches tasks with each cycle, resulting in a CPU pipeline containing instructions from various tasks from which the term interleaved is derived.

The fine-grained type is implemented in barrel processors. They have an advantage over x86 and other architectures that they can guarantee specific timing (useful for hard real-time embedded systems) in addition to being less complex to implement due to assumptions that one can make.