At work, I've had the (dis-)pleasure of working with a proprietary SoC made by one of the dominant vendors. The chip only has 32KB of RAM for running code on its application processor (one of many cores inside the chip). Due to various reasons, we only have just over 1KB for stack frames. The rest of the memory is mostly used for statically allocated variables and the heap. I remember from that one VLSI class many moons ago that memory cells tend to occupy a large chunk of space and power in an IC. In our application, since power and size is important, I can understand why we're using this chip in spite of its memory limitations. Considering the cost, performance, and features, it's one of the best choices for its package size. However, trying to deal with those limitations has been quite the adventure. A kind of dumb adventure.