[jwilliams]

Well yes, but "embedded" is a pretty broad category.

Some major cases are:

- High-volume and cost-driven: where a you're picking the cheapest MCU you can make work (often by a matter of cents).You want to squeeze every last bit of performance (or IO, or power consumption, or pinout, or whatever the drivers are).

- Real-time: where abstracting the hardware beyond a certain point is counter-productive.

In my experience it's much less common that you don't care about the hardware than the reverse.

[atoav]

I'd also add: ultra low power consumption. If you really want to use as little power as possible to do a specific task