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Intel Buys Embedded Software Vendor Wind River
SlashDotDotDot writes "The New York Times reports that Intel will purchase Wind River, the embedded OS and software vendor, for $884 million. 'Wind River makes operating systems for platforms as diverse as autos and mobile phones, serving customers like Sony and Boeing. Intel, whose processors run about 80 percent of the world's personal computers, is expanding into new markets, including chips for televisions and mobile devices. Wind River's software and customer list will pave the way for Intel to win more chip contracts.'"
Finally an obscure company I've heard of. We have quite a few Windriver AC-104 boxes running around. Bullet proof and with nothing but Deutsch connectors. Most people in this building prefer Mathworks/SpeedGoat's little blue boxes but they always seem to break pins.
AC-104s were originally for Matrix-X, but we run Matlab's RTT on them for embedded control of engines.
Given that Wind River supports a wide variety of embedded chips from many vendors other than Intel I wonder what sort of impact this will have, especially since Wind River also supports VxWorks which is used on many embedded devices.
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Their OS, VxWorks, was/is used on many spacecrafts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VxWorks#Spacecraft_using_VxWorks
My philosophy on embedded chipmakers is two-fold. First, they are on a financially insecure base as are the flash memory manufacturers. Second, There are too many embedded chipmakers out there at the moment.
Now where this comes into play is the chaos effect generated by a chipmaker purchasing an embedded software company. This is a strong move in the wrong direction as evidenced by Intel's previous software company purchases. It is interesting to notice how well Intel's proprietary hardware software works, but when Intel begins developing OSes and applications, things will become a little too "black box" and will be hard to support in the future. In this way, it is highly probable that everyone will lose, Intel will shed off Wind River, a lot of people will lose their jobs, and we will be back to exactly where we started!!
Why? Just ignore them.
Hear that? Its the Wind River guys LAUGHING all the way to the bank!
Embedded devices use Arm chips, the design is open. The toolkits are free. Only idiotic, big organizations like Boeing use Wind River stuff. I have talked to people who are going to linux just to ditch Wind River and VxWorks.
How does Intel plan to compete against $6 Arm chips? A smart meter has no need for a 64bit, fat, power hungry, hot 3Ghz pc type chip with no peripherals builtin.
Methinks they just wasted a lot of cash.
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Those of us who have hard real-time requirements need something like VxWorks. Or if you have ARINC 653 requirements, etc....
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VxWorks is not a bad embedded OS. In fact, I'd call it quite good. Not great, but definitely good. There's very very little support out there for such architectures as VME, and VME is definitely an important architecture. There's next-to-no support in any of the F/L/OSS BSDs or Linux for this important bus, for example.
Wind River has also contributed a fair bit to Linux and the *BSDs over time, a fact we shouldn't forget. Will Intel keep up that investment? Intel already invests a fair bit into Linux, but I just don't see them increasing that to cover the loss of investment from Wind River.
Could Intel be aiming at the OS market? They no longer get the kind of support from Microsoft that they once enjoyed. I don't think so - embedded OS' just don't sell in the kind of numbers you'd need.
Then what is it that Wind River has that Intel wants? Hmmm. I don't know, but I'm going to guess that it's more of a defensive move than an offensive one. Microsoft has been buying up biotech software companies, recently. Biotech companies use embedded OS'.
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To tell you the truth, I just have more experience with RTEMS. Back before the real time extension were available, Linux of any variant wasn't truly a real-time OS, and that pushed it from consideration from projects. Now there are a lot of real time Linux variants out there, but the ball got rolling with RTEMS before Linux ocould be considered seriously. Now whether or not a specific mission needs 'real-time' as in 'hard real time' or as in 'really fast' is a totally different topic.
Those of us who have hard real-time requirements need something like VxWorks. Or if you have ARINC 653 requirements, etc....
That is what OSs like Green Hills or Precise are for. VxWorks is a total waste. Last time I touched VxWorks (2004) they still weren't even using the MMU on the processor and forced you to run your apps with process separation.
I work for an embedded systems manufacturer that switched to Windows Embedded as a result of Wind River's horrible support. Fortunately for them, they used VxWorks on Intel, so things are probably going to look good moving forward. For this company, USB support was the last straw. Wind River knew that lots of USB flash devices didn't work on their OS, and they wanted to charge for the development time to fix their bug AND then the OS upgrade once it was fixed. It eventually got to the point where the company was stockpiling the USB flash drives that worked on VxWorks, since they were getting hard to find. Finally Wind River they fixed it, but after this company switched OSs. It would have cost over a million dollars for licenses for the new version of the OS that contained the bug fix. Since Intel was on the USB development committees, I expect this problem (and other hardware-related issues) will vanish quickly. I just feel sorry for all the people who used VxWorks on Motorola chips, etc.
How does Intel plan to compete against $6 Arm chips? A smart meter has no need for a 64bit, fat, power hungry, hot 3Ghz pc type chip with no peripherals builtin.
The tie-in to Intel hardware would obviously be through Atom. Though at ~2W, it's not positioned to take over the majority of segments Wind River went into I don't think (if Atom was an atom, most embedded processors/microcontrollers would be electrons or quarks). However it may get embedded customers used to dealing with Intel, could easily get them some significant Atom design wins, and overall help pave the way for future Intel incursions into the embedded space.
Why they want to expand into such a low-margin market I'm not exactly sure, but I won't question their wisdom. I'm assuming they've run numbers that make it look like a good use of fab space. Not like that always has worked out for them (to put it mildly) and I doubt they can push out Arm by any means, but it could still work out profitably for them in the end.
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Wind River owns the BSDI code. What is Intel going to do with it now? Leave it dead? Give it to the FreeBSD guys? GPL it? Does Apple want it?
Those of you with hard real-time requirements who think VxWorks and Arinc 653 is the answer need to get with the times.
I use VxWorks and Arinc at work and I just bought a $150 armadeus board online (which runs linux BTW) to mess around with at home. I can do more with that board and free software than I can with 20k worth of equipment at work.
The fact of the matter is anything without an FPGA should never be called "real time". 4 microseconds of jitter is laughable when you have an FPGA. I can do 10 nanosecond precision timing on Spartan 3's without batting an eye.
And while linux isn't 'man-rated' software, VxWorks shouldn't be either. If you want REAL reliability you need something like an L4 microkernel. At least people have tried to do formally prove that the L4 is correct. VxWorks can make no such claim.
What about the possibility/perception of weakening support in VxWorks for non-Intel (mainly ARM right now) embedded processors?
Obviously, Wind River's VxWorks OS running on ARM is *the* main competitor to running on Intel in the embedded space. And there are non-ARM up-and-comers (nvidia?) in the embedded space that will require good VxWorks support to really make it. Now they will have to kowtow to their biggest competitor (Intel) or live by Linux and water alone.