When Robert Poor looks at the world, he sees 50 billion embedded microcontrollers, the workhorse chips inside cars, traffic lights and air conditioners, doing their jobs in splendid isolation.

FORBES: EMBEDDED NETWORKS

Meanwhile, MPC Data is going after much more of a niche, but doing it well: its SwiftBoot tech can get Linux up and running an actual application on an embedded device-ready Renesas SuperH SH7724 processor in under a second (0.982 seconds, to be precise).

ENGADGET: Lineo's Warp 2 boots to Fedora on Atom in 4 seconds, MPC Data's SwiftBoot warms up embedded Linux in an instant