Recently I attended the Embedded Systems Conference and Expo in Boston. My company was sponsoring our first ever booth at this event, and we were announcing our first product, a JTAG In-Circuit Debugger for AMD processors. Our purpose in creating this product was to enable software and systems developers with tools to unleash creativity. We had a lot of interest and that gave me the chance to personally speak with a wide variety of people (more than 40 in total and all technical) while I was at the event.

What I found most interesting was the common theme, “I don’t use x86. I work on Embedded.” Recounting my conversations, I estimated that I heard this same thought from more than a dozen different engineers. Frankly, this view worried me a bit. I had just invested a lot of time and man power in creating x86 embedded development tools. As I thought more about it though, I was actually relieved.

The problem was not that x86 doesn’t fit with embedded; it is actually that x86 doesn’t work with embedded. Let me explain.
Sponsored by AMD