Reducing negative effects of insufficient data throughput for real-time processing

An electronic device comprising:

• a processing module configured to:
• issue memory requests to retrieve data from a memory,
• receive a response for each issued memory request, and
• process the received responses to generate output data;
• a buffer arranged to receive and store the output data generated by the processing module, and to later provide the stored output data to a real-time module;
• a buffer monitoring circuit coupled to the buffer and configured to output an underflow approaching state indication in response to an amount of available data in the buffer being less than or equal to a first threshold;
• and
• a memory access module arranged to receive the memory requests issued by the processing module, and configured to:
• while operating in a first mode, respond to memory requests received from the processing module with corresponding data retrieved from the memory,
• switch to operating in a second mode in response to receiving the underflow approaching state indication, and
• in response to operating in the second mode, respond to memory requests received from the processing module with an indication that the memory access module did not attempt to retrieve corresponding data from the memory.