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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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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.
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'.
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)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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