hardware acceleration of very specific but complex mathematical problems, like the Fourier transform or matrix operations. Some chips, like the Motorola MC68356, even included more than one processor core to work in parallel. Other DSPs from 1995 are the TI TMS320C541 or the TMS320C80.

The fourth generation is best characterized by the changes in the instruction set and the instruction encoding/decoding. SIMD extensions were added, and VLIW and the superscalar architecture appeared. As always, the clock speeds have increased; a 3 ns