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Intel Buys Embedded Software Vendor Wind River

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the controlling-your-supply-lines dept.

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.'"

28 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Yuck by Red+Flayer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Uh-oh...

    I'm not a big fan of one of the largest chipmakers venturing into embedded systems. Given Intel's track record, something tells me that things are going to get fugly for companies that sell embedded systems as a component of larger products.

    I sure hope someone will be playing close attention to Intel's pricing... if they use Wind River's systems as a loss leader for their chips, that would suck for a competitive chip market.

    --
    "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
    1. Re:Yuck by korbin_dallas · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      They Live, We Sleep
    2. Re:Yuck by phantomfive · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm not sure that it's all that great of a move. Wind River generally targets projects with small chips (mainly ARM, these days) for embedded projects. Intel doesn't actually make chips like that, the smallest they have is ATOM, which is still pretty hefty. If you're running an ATOM chip, why not use linux embedded or WinCE? It's a lot easier to use and find developers for.

      In my mind this either signals that Intel is going to try to make smaller chips (and probably fail, since x86 is a beast), or have a nonexistent target market, but they should have realized this. The only thing I can think of really is that Intel realized that they have no clue what kind of chips embedded software developers need, and they thought the easiest way to get that expertise would be to buy an embedded software company.

      Maybe there's another motive, but I can't see it. And given the number of weird ideas I've seen from analysts, I don't think many other people understand either.

      Maybe the CEO of Intel has a brother in law at Wind River who needs some financial help? Who knows.

      --
      Qxe4
    3. Re:Yuck by Amazing+Quantum+Man · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Those of us who have hard real-time requirements need something like VxWorks. Or if you have ARINC 653 requirements, etc....

      --
      Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
    4. Re:Yuck by jd · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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'.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    5. Re:Yuck by Chris+Burke · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

      --

      The enemies of Democracy are
    6. Re:Yuck by LordNimon · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If Intel just wanted better VxWorks support for their chips, they could have done that for a lot less than $900 million, and they wouldn't need to buy the whole company. For less than a million per year, they could have had a few of their own employees work on-site at Wind River exclusively on improving VxWorks support for Intel products.

      --
      And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
      To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
    7. Re:Yuck by jd · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Exactly. On the other hand, if Microsoft is buying up companies that are involved in the Embedded market, then Microsoft would have to pay Intel whatever Intel asked in order to get Windows to interoperate better with such system (or replace the OS entirely).

      This would give Intel some small degree of leverage that it simply wouldn't have otherwise, and would prevent Microsoft from buying those embedded OS makers themselves (which would give Microsoft even more power over Intel - something I doubt Intel desires).

      This is why I can see a defensive reason for Intel wanting Wind River, but no offensive reason. I can see nothing Wind River can give Intel that Intel couldn't have obtained for less, as you note, OTHER than protection from the consequences of Microsoft owning Wind River.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    8. Re:Yuck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    9. Re:Yuck by schwaang · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This is why I can see a defensive reason for Intel wanting Wind River, but no offensive reason.

      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.

    10. Re:Yuck by korbin_dallas · · Score: 5, Informative

      Wrong, Wind River bought all Walnut Creek assets, then kicked Slackware to the curb. Patrick had to fire his 2 employees, and go back to a one man show.

      All they wanted was BSD, cause they could keep that closed.

      No, Wind River was no friend to Linux.

      --
      They Live, We Sleep
    11. Re:Yuck by symbolset · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm going to fix that for you.

      Microsoft entering the X market by buying up an X vendor, rebranding it as its own product, then leveraging its monopoly to make said product the de-facto X product SHOULD have run afoul of many anti-trust laws.

      Now permute X across all markets including OS, office software, programming languages, databases, antivirus, full disk compression, full disk encryption, folder compression, and every other darned thing they sell. They didn't invent any of it. They buy the pot of soup, pee in the pot, then sell the soup. That's their business model and it always has been. They used to be really good at selling that watered down soup, and that's why they're where they're where they're at. Now, I'm not so sure everybody wants their soup.

      Oh, and the above is not entirely correct. Sometimes they promise the pot to a chef who prepares the soup, and then kill him for the recipe before the batch is done. They even coined a name for that strategy: "Knife the baby". When people find out about that, they're less likely to be interested in working in their kitchen.

      --
      Help stamp out iliturcy.
  2. Industrial little boxes. by 0100010001010011 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  3. Non-Intel support by AaronW · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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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  4. Not only autos and mobile phones by mmustapic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Their OS, VxWorks, was/is used on many spacecrafts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VxWorks#Spacecraft_using_VxWorks

    1. Re:Not only autos and mobile phones by npsimons · · Score: 2, Informative

      Their OS, VxWorks, was/is used on many spacecrafts

      It's also one of the very, very few OSes certified for aircraft. Wind River paid a good amount of money to get it certified, and as a customer you will pay an arm and a leg through your nose to get that certified software. It's one of the reasons on a (very) short list that we use it instead of Linux for a lot of software that goes on aircraft. Personally, I'm not too impressed with vxWorks, but I am a little disturbed by Intel picking them up; most embedded systems I've ever worked with are non-Intel (mostly PowerPC). How will this affect their support of non-Intel platforms? Of course, I was mildly annoyed when one of my former employers sold Wind River RTLinux, but they still seem to be going strong.

      --
      Nathan's blog
  5. Actually... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!!

    1. Re:Actually... by phantomfive · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Intel has a common design strategy of making two different teams work on the exact same project, without even knowing about the existence of the other. It is somewhat demoralizing to give your sweat and time to a project and realize that no one will ever see it because someone else in your company did the exact same thing.

      My theory is it works really well for their manufacturing process, because you can experiment with different manufacturing ideas, and take whatever is best. It works horribly for software/chip design and creative type processes, because if you know its happening (and they've been doing it for decades, so you know it's happening), you have no morale to begin with.

      Thus frequently AMD ends up with better chip designs, and Intel with better manufacturing processes.

      --
      Qxe4
    2. Re:Actually... by NovaX · · Score: 3, Interesting

      As an outsider, that isn't what I see. AMD has bought most of its core technology rather than designing it from scratch. The K6 was from NexGen, the bus from DEC (Socket A, HyperTransport), the Athlon was a great traditional design (P6/Alpha/PowerPC-like in ideas), the memory controller experience came from Alpha hires, their embedded chip is based on Cyrix's, etc. AMD has been quite good at taking proven ideas and implementing them for the mass market with a lot of success. The primary innovations they are given credit for is the memory controller on x86 (first done Transmetta Crusoe), HyperTransport (DEC), and multi-core (IBM Power).

      Intel always seemed to be an innovative company that heavily funds R&D, but can have utter flops by not being pragmatic enough to drop a bad design. While they fail badly, the ideas are usually quite unique and I'm sure educational. The fact that they recover rather than repeatedly making bad calls (e.g. Sun) shows that they are resilliant. Having the different design teams probably helps to both recover from a flop and not corrupt creativity by allowing groups to go into different directions. As you indicate, though, there are only so many good ideas and the duplication has to be extremely frustrating.

      So I'm not sure if Intel's approach is bad and they tend to be more innovative than AMD. Its costly, though, and as a consumer I've happily gone with AMD/Cyrix/etc when Intel pushes a flop chip.

      --

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  6. The future is ARM and Linux by bzzfzz · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Unless Intel decides to get as serious about the embedded world as they have been historically about the desktop, this amounts to last rites for Wind River. Starting with the 80186 in 1982, Intel's embedded processor offerings have been adaptations of desktop technology that have failed to stimulate the imagination of anyone building anything more sexy than a cash register. The needs of the embedded device market differ considerably and Intel does not understand them. Intel's idea of having a more highly integrated northbridge/southbridge/CPU package is just wrong. The embedded market needs products that don't have architectures that complicated rather than band-aids.

    At this point, I'll take Linux with a GCC toolchain over VxWorks for any embedded project just to avoid the single-company support choke point and the costs and hassles with licensing. The nominally higher levels of integration and sophistication of commercial products aren't worth it.

    1. Re:The future is ARM and Linux by PCM2 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Unless Intel decides to get as serious about the embedded world as they have been historically about the desktop, this amounts to last rites for Wind River ... At this point, I'll take Linux with a GCC toolchain over VxWorks for any embedded project just to avoid the single-company support choke point and the costs and hassles with licensing.

      You're aware that Wind River has offered its own optimized Linux distro for embedded systems for years now, including extensions for real-time systems? And that it runs on ARM and XScale?

      --
      Breakfast served all day!
  7. Party like it's 1989... by argent · · Score: 5, Informative

    Intel used to have its own real-time controls division, with the iRMX operating system written in PL/M and PL/M-86, Multibus and Multibus-II hardware, and a development system that ran on Xenix and MS-DOS. They systematically dumped the whole thing in the '90s, finally handing RMX over to TenAsys in 2000.

    Guess it's time for that old second marriage.

  8. Re:VxWorks PC support by nicholasjay · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  9. Thank goodness by MobyDisk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  10. aargh by amb5l · · Score: 2, Informative

    VxWorks seems to have been around forever in the high performance embedded computing scene, with solid VME support. (Amazing how VME keeps going, it was "on the way out" when I started life as a junior hardware engineer 20 years ago.) The software engineers I work with hate it, though. Extremely late "proper" support for PCI and likewise for SMP are a couple of issues I recall causing much annoyance. Unfortunately our customers keep using and re-using it, so we accept it as a necessary evil.

    The problem for my business is that we (like many embedded folks) are still doing good business with the PowerPC architecture, despite the frustrations of PA Semi's disappearance, and something of standstill on high end devices at Freescale and IBM. Surely the perception will develop that yet another roadblock to using PowerPC in embedded systems is going to develop.

    So I guess we high end embedded folks will have to jump on the Intel bandwagon. I just hope something positive happens on the BIOS front - that's one area where PowerPC is really great (U-Boot, CFE etc.) Having looked at Intel for ATCA products in the past, the BIOS issue was IIRC an outrageously expensive nightmare if you wanted source code, and plain expensive if not...

    I would be very tempted by Atom and Tolapai if I could get U-Boot (or something as good) for Intel. How helpful are Intel to open source BIOS efforts?

  11. The WRS perspective... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Hello dear /.ers,

    Intel has made it very clear to WRS that WRS will be maintained [semi] autonomously - WRS has lots of deals with Intel's competitors, and Intel has lots of deals with WRS' competitors. However, WRS was already working very closely with Intel on products supporting the Intel architecture, and WRS has embedded/os knowledge and strategic connections that could prove extremely useful to Intel.

    Intel has also made it extremely clear to all involved (WRS employees & customers) that it's not desirable (to anyone!) to drop non-Intel architecture support. Bubbling through the ranks, that message is affecting priorities - WRS very much does not want to scare non-Intel customers away.

    So, from the WRS perspective, we may get a little bit more help/tools from Intel (yay), we may be able to stop taking mandatory vacation time (yeesh), and they may even bring some of our other benefits back. So far a good thing. I wouldn't expect any major changes to products in the near future.

    disclaimer: I am not a WRS marketing guy. I am an engineer working on architectural code for many architectures, Intel included. I am also an avid /. reader.

    There you go - horse's mouth, so to speak.

  12. BSDI? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

  13. Re:This is a monopolistic move by Epistax · · Score: 2, Informative

    If Intel in any way restricts VxWorks for other architectures compared to any of Intel's, I think real time Linux work will surge. Right now (for us) VxWorks really is the only solution. The current real time-ish Linuxes available are not deterministic enough (we took probe measurements), but if that changes, we might gladly switch, if only because of the extreme cost of VxWorks. It'll also be interesting to see what happens to the support department behind VxWorks, as it has waned recently.