# Right-size your hardware
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 The choices made in hardware component selection can greatly influence the operational phase impact of devices and therefore must be carefully considered. The use case should dictate the required CPU/MCU, peripherals and communication modules on the device.  When choosing the processor, amount of RAM, and amount of flash storage, the designer must focus on resource optimization; over-provisioning hardware can lead to choosing a processor that has a large power draw but stays mostly idle or has an excess of memory that never gets used, increasing the overall carbon footprint of the device unnecessarily. Under-sizing hardware can lead to long execution times or a lack of extensibility necessary to insure the longevity of the device. 

 Your design will typically fall into one of three broad classes of devices – Microcontroller (MCU) class devices, Microprocessor (MPU) class devices, and devices that use hardware acceleration for machine learning use cases (which we refer to as "Inference class" devices).