Today, the boundaries between the general purpose PCs, the servers and the embedded systems are more blurred. These computers are sharing same platforms, same peripherals. For example, an x86/Mac PC can be used as a server, an x86/PowerPC CPU can be used in an embedded system like portable navigation device (PND). On the other way, the popular embedded processor StrongARM was a powerful desktop PC processor for the DEC workstation, and the embedded systems often also act servers, like NAS (Network Attached Storage). As same as the hardware suppliers, the OS suppliers port their products into the desktop PCs, servers and embedded systems.

To read more go to our book about Embedded OS.