After the EOL date, OEMs are prohibited from shipping new devices with C7 license stickers . To continue shipping legacy hardware, manufacturers often use "downgrade rights" from a newer Windows Embedded Compact 2013 license. Development Requirements
At its core, Windows Embedded CE 7.0 was built upon the heritage of its predecessors, maintaining a distinct separation from the desktop Windows NT kernel. This was a crucial design choice. While desktop Windows required robust processors and significant memory, CE 7.0 was a "hard real-time" operating system designed to run on multiple processor architectures, including ARM, x86, and MIPS.