You can get higher speeds without missing steps, where the same settings in grbl would result in a lot of stutter. It’s noticeable, by ear alone, how much smoother the smoothieboard is. The novice driver tends to go full-throttle and hard braking to try and gain overall speed, whereas being gentle on the throttle and brakes results in faster progression, with less loss of traction, more safely, with less wear and tear on components. Think of how a rally driver takes a series of slippery bends vs a teenager in an overpowered car Or in my case, and experience, how an advanced motorcyclist moves through a set of bends. this makes for a lot of wasted energy and is hard on machinery. Grbl, by contrast has a very jerky acceleration - stop to full speed is linear. It has a 120MHz processor with a lot of RAM, so has longer look-ahead and thus, can motion-plan further out.

So, in layman’s terms, it starts off slower, builds speed longer, so higher speeds possible, and decelerates in a sine, giving you smoother, better motion. It gives smooth, jerk-free motion and higher speeds, due to the advanced motion planning. They accelerate/decelerate more gently, giving a ‘smooth’ operation, hence the name. Smoothieware has advanced motion control where the planning acceleration forms a sine, rather than a sawtooth.

Cohesion3d