[Gibbon1]

In a lot of these cases a small foot print and guaranteed latency is vastly more important than raw speed. As in with a task that runs 20 times a second, it's not important that it finishes in 1 ms or 3 ms, but having the system go away for 500ms is not acceptable.

[nanolith]

I guess I should have clarified that "reliable and predictable" performance is critical. In practice though, these systems have fast enough context switching.

I agree with you that "fast enough" is the only metric that matters here.