How are payment HSMs different from general-purpose HSM?

Payment and general-purpose HSMs are optimized for different IT environments. A payment HSM might be designed to handle hundreds or even thousands of payment transactions per second. On the other hand, a general-purpose HSM might specialize in use cases outside of payments. This could be encrypting files and applications, creating and signing encryption keys, acting as a certificate authority (CA), and authenticating client devices across a network. In summary, the use cases an HSM must fulfill are determined by the environment in which it will be deployed.