On really high volume consumer electronics, multiply any cost savings by tens of millions. Now you're talking real money. The HW engineers have knife fights in

On really high volume consumer electronics, multiply any cost savings by tens of millions. Now you're talking real money. The HW engineers have knife fights in the hallways over resistors that cost less than a penny. I'm kidding about the knives. But cost reduction meetings can be pretty brutal, especially when the HW team is looking at the SW and firmware folks across the table and saying, "Sure, this is painful, but you can program around it. It saves us ten cents." Ten cents is a fortune. In pre-ARM days I once saw a HW team seriously propose half populating memory. No, not that way. The other direction, where they'd just take away the upper half of each byte of RAM and thus save a chip. "Only use the low four bits of each byte, you can just program around that, right?" The only reason that cost reduction didn't fly was there was no way to make the stack work properly for interrupts. First rule of consumer electronics: "No one cares how much you suffered getting it out the door."