Intel Buys Embedded Software Vendor Wind River 141
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.'"
Industrial little boxes. (Score:4, 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 [speedgoat.ch] 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.
Non-Intel support (Score:5, 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.
Not only autos and mobile phones (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually... (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!!
Re:Yuck (Score:5, 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.
Re:Yuck (Score:5, Interesting)
Those of us who have hard real-time requirements need something like VxWorks. Or if you have ARINC 653 requirements, etc....
Re:Yuck (Score:5, 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'.
Re:VxWorks PC support (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Yuck (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Thank goodness (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yuck (Score:3, 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.
Re:Actually... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
BSDI? (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?
Re:Actually... (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.
Re:Yuck (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.
Re:Yuck (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:BSDI? (Score:1, 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?
according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD/OS [wikipedia.org] Wind River stopped doing anything with it in 2003. Who knows if there is anything in there worth having now.