Comment by ijustlovemath

This is the difference between soft and hard realtime. For something that's heavy on signal processing, with some softer comms requirements (eg a B115200 serial interface for commanding/uploading programs), I'd probably reach for an FPGA + Linux MCU (a vendored Linux made for these kinds of applications).

I certainly would never describe a product as real time if there was not a true realtime component to it, but I think people think it sounds cool and slap it on anything that's high performance. Happy to answer any specific questions on my email, see the profile.