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Comment by davidrm | Hacker News Reader

> That's not middling, that's ridiculously overpowered for almost anything embedded.

well you obviously have a different idea of embedded. Sure, there are different requirements for different systems, but in IoT, my previous company shipped tens of thousands of devices (fleet monitoring, smart sensor networks etc) and everyhing was based on STM32 L & F series, Cortex M0, M3 & M4. Now, in automotive we have MPC57xx.

> Re-implementing this stuff isn't just a minor drag, it's commercial insanity

absolutely agree. if there will be an adoption it will be incredibly slow. Logical but extremely frustrating.

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I used to do a lot of embedded work and found it really interesting where people draw the line on what is "embedded"

Around 2009ish, I had a coworker who swore anything over 16 bits wasn't embedded. We were working on a MMU-less uClinux ARM7 system with 16mb of RAM and no networking and that didn't meet his criteria for "true embedded".

The next job I had was a piece of customer premises equipment that ran a fairly high powered ARM board with dual gigabit ethernet links and a lot of user space written in PHP. No one on that team questioned that it was an embedded system.

It always seemed like a strange thing to gatekeep on. Personally, I base my definition more on the use case than the power of the machine.

> Around 2009ish, I had a coworker who swore anything over 16 bits wasn't embedded.

When I were a lad, if you had more than a dozen bytes of RAM it wasn't REAL embedded. /shakes-cane

I generally use your definition, though. Any computer that the end user doesn't think of as a computer (and isn't expected to maintain or directly use) is embedded, whether it's a camera with touchscreen GUI or an ABS processor in a car.

highly resource constrained, real time, bare metal (or micro kernel) embedded programmers tend to think what they do as "embedded programming". There's a certain element of truth to it if you make the distinction between "embedded system" and "embedded programming". "Embedded programming" loosely groups a bunch of techniques for dealing with real time, bare metal, resource constrained devices. But there is no real formal distinction between those things.

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