to accelerate tight loops; they also had an addressing unit capable of loop-addressing. Some of them operated on 24-bit variables, and a typical model only required about 21 ns for a MAC. Members of this generation were, for example, the AT&T DSP16A or the Motorola 56000.

The main improvement in the third generation was the appearance of application-specific units and instructions in the data path, or sometimes as coprocessors. These units allowed direct