I'm smoking multiprotocol wireless systems for industrial, medical, and military applications. To my recollection, the very smallest of those was around 280K in .text, and 180K in .data. Others have been 2-3x larger in both areas.

I would sure hope a decstation3100 emulator is small. After all, it's worthless unless you actually run something within the emulator, and that will inevitably be much larger than the emulator itself. I wouldn't know, though. Believe it or not, nobody pays me to emulate computers from 1978.

There are plenty of embedded applications that require megabytes or even gigabytes.

For example medical imaging.

As well as plenty that require 16 bytes of RAM and a few hundred bytes of program memory. And everything in between.

If it's in the gigabyte range it's just not an MCU by any stretch. And if it has a proper (LP)DDR controller it's not one either really

Yes and no. Plenty of such applications that use a µC + an FPGA. FPGA interfaces with some DDR memory and CMOS/CCD/whatever.

Up to you what you call it.

So you make hardware costing dozens of thousands of dollars and brag about memory on 5$ chip? That explains a lot why so many medical and industrial (I haven’t touch military hardware) are so badly designed, with some sad proprietary protocols and dead few months after warranty passes. Today I’ve learned!

As if that depends on the engineers!

When you make 1M thingies, $5 savings each means $5M CEO comp.