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Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems
Intel has
announced plans to acquire Wind River Systems Inc.
"Intel Corporation has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Wind River Systems Inc, under which Intel will acquire all outstanding Wind River common stock for $11.50 per share in cash, or approximately $884 million in the aggregate. Wind River is a leading software vendor in embedded devices, and will become part of Intel's strategy to grow its processor and software presence outside the traditional PC and server market segments into embedded systems and mobile handheld devices."
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ARM's not going to be happy Posted Jun 4, 2009 22:26 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] I was going to talk about the impact on ARM, but Ars Technica beat me to it.
ARM's not going to be happy Posted Jun 5, 2009 2:25 UTC (Fri) by brugolsky (✭ supporter ✭, #28) [Link]
Intel acquired StrongARM from DEC, renamed it XScale in later revisions, but failed to do much with it; eventually they sold it. Intel seems organizationally incapable of supporting more than one general purpose CPU architecture -- witness the fate of the i860, StrongARM, and Itanium. [The i960 family did well as a peripheral controller.]
AMD seemed to make much better use of their slice of the DEC technology portfolio and the DEC engineering diaspora ...
ARM's not going to be happy Posted Jun 5, 2009 4:42 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
I donno.
Xscale seems insanely common to me. Used in all sorts of things.
ARM's not going to be happy Posted Jun 5, 2009 7:54 UTC (Fri) by simlo (subscriber, #10866) [Link]
I worked for a company using VxWorks on StrongARM. It was terrible: Intel stopped the StrongARM after a short while and then WindRiver dropped support for it. We couldn't get updates for anything. Especially the old version of gcc (some kind of 2.96) was bad. The debugger (gdb with a WindRiver GUI and custom remote protocol) crashed all the time when you used it on C++ code.
ARM's not going to be happy Posted Jun 5, 2009 9:39 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
So just like normal gdb then? ;PPPP
(yes I know Archer will fix this happy sheep will jump over fences and all will be well with the world)
ARM's not going to be happy Posted Jun 5, 2009 17:09 UTC (Fri) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] That article is kind of confusing for me... it says VxWorks is known for being everything that Windows is not, i.e., lean, mean, and 100 percent bulletproof. I am not sure to whom that is known, but definitely not me, someone who has had to write software for it. I have found VxWorks amazingly convoluted, broken, and difficult to use for something which does so little, and I have yet to find software engineers who voluntarily prefer it to alternatives. The only good reason I know of to use it is because of legacy software and hardware... and it has been this way for years. My observation has been it is dying slowly, surely, and deservedly. I do not mean to suggest it does not have a lot of people using it, just like Symbian, Ada, BREW... I can not even imagine the loss of VxWorks having a negative impact on ARM.
ARM's not going to be happy Posted Jun 5, 2009 21:56 UTC (Fri) by robert_s (subscriber, #42402) [Link]
I too have never heard a good thing about vxWorks, but many bad. The time linksys routers switched to vxWorks (it allowed them to use slightly less flash) was a nightmare of instability.
ARM's not going to be happy Posted Jun 6, 2009 7:07 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
If you need to write a realtime system, it's about as good as you're going to get.
Most people no longer need to do this.
ARM's not going to be happy Posted Jun 8, 2009 4:33 UTC (Mon) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] If you need to write a realtime system, it's about as good as you're going to get. I disagree. There are other RTOS's out there with better tools and better support, with better thread switching time, interrupt response time, smaller image size, etc, etc, etc (pick your favorite RT metric). I really do like the quote vxWorks really is the Windows of the embedded word - it seems to fit vxWorks quite well.
ARM's not going to be happy Posted Jun 14, 2009 6:30 UTC (Sun) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]
This is true pretty much only if you're OK with writing portions of your software in assembly. If you want the benfits of C, my statements are pretty accurate.
Now, in the *embedded* market, it's a very clumsy fit.
ARM's not going to be happy Posted Jun 5, 2009 18:02 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
(Reading the other two articles there)
So nVidia will actually start relying on an ARM platform? Assuming that they don't rely on windows mobile alone, does it mean that they'll actually need proper Linux drivers there?
Not really Posted Jun 7, 2009 13:53 UTC (Sun) by khim (guest, #9252) [Link] Assuming that they don't rely on windows mobile alone, does it mean that they'll actually need proper Linux drivers there? You don't have linux drivers. They DO have them. Sure, it's illegal by GPL, but after years and years of abuse tolerance (Broadcom and others were never sued AFAIK) I doubt it'll be possible to go to court and get positive resolution now...
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