In a server or a personal computer, the executable applications and libraries reside in storage devices. At the beginning of the execution, they are accessed, transformed, possibly uncompressed, and stored in RAM before the execution starts.
The firmware of an embedded device is in general one single binary file containing all the software components, which can be transferred to the internal flash memory of the MCU. Since the flash memory is directly mapped to a fixed address in the memory space, the processor is capable of sequentially fetching and executing single instructions from it with no intermediate steps. This mechanism is called execute in place (XIP). All non-modifiable sections on the firmware don't need to be loaded ...
