In our recent works, by leveraging a combination of parallelism, approximation, and structure exploitation, we have enabled and accelerated (nonlinear) trajectory optimization solvers for real-time performance on non-standard computational hardware, ranging from microcontrollers (MCUs) to graphical processing units (GPUs). This has led to real-time MPC onboard an MCU powered 27g quadrotor for dynamic obstacle avoidance, as well as simulated whole-body nonlinear MPC at kHz rates for a GPU powered manipulator for high speed trajectory tracking.