And really, there is no such thing as a standard embedded system. Even if you use a standard backplane and buy off-the-shelf boards and cards to put in it, the combination of cards and added mezzanine cards makes each system quite unique. If you could use completely standard PC hardware for your system with no custom additions or special IO units, the thing would in likelihood not actually be an embedded system.

This article was brought in by Power.org, since Power Architecture is one of the most common processor architectures in rack-based infrastructure equipment. If you wondered why Power Architecture featured so prominently in the article.