What's the difference between a microcontroller and a microprocessor?
Answer
A microprocessor generally does not have RAM, ROM and IO pins. It usually uses its pins as a bus to interface to peripherals such as RAM, ROM, Serial ports, Digital and Analog IO. It is expandable at the board level due to this.
A microcontroller is 'all in one', the processor, ram, IO all on the one chip, as such you cannot (say) increase the amount of RAM available or the number of IO ports. The controlling bus is internal and not available to the board designer.
This means that a microprocessor is generally capable of being built into bigger general purpose applications than a microcontroller. The microcontroller is usually used for more dedicated applications.
All of these are very general statements. There are chips available that blur the boundaries.
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