After solidifying their partnership on single-core Intel Atom processors, Wind River and Intel are now collaborating on multicore. The two companies announced they will market multicore solutions for the embedded market, including versions of Wind River Linux and its new hypervisor technology tuned to Intel architecture multicore processors.

Intel and Wind River will align their research and development, sales and marketing, professional services, and engineering resources behind joint multicore designs, says the companies. They will initially target aerospace and defense, network infrastructure, industrial, medical, and print imaging market segments.

Major collaborative projects are said to include:

• Optimizing Wind River Linux and VxWorks on Embedded Intel architecture processors
• Optimizing Wind River's hypervisor technology for Intel processors and Intel Virtualization Technology (VT)
• Increasing interoperability of development tools for analysis and tuning of multicore devices
• Integrating Intel compiler and performance primitives into Wind River multicore software platforms for Intel processors

Already, Wind River has started enhancing its Workbench and On-Chip Debugging development suite for multicore Intel Core 2, as well as the Intel Atom processors. The companies also report they have collaborated to deliver customer-specific requests for asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) support on Intel Core 2 processors.

Wind River's cross-platform hypervisor

This summer, Wind River announced a hypervisor and virtualization toolkit that will work on both Linux and VxWorks. This week at Embedded World in Nuremburg, Germany, Wind River is said to have demonstrated hypervisor technology running on an Atom Z530 platform.

The partnership with Intel appears to involve the Wind River Platform for Network Equipment. This Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) 4.0-registered networking version of Wind River Linux supports a variety of multicore processors, including the Intel Core 2.

An auto show

The partnership on multicore follows up on a relationship begun last year regarding the Intel Atom and Intel-sponsored Moblin platform for embedded Linux development. Last May, Wind River announced an automotive stack for Moblin and the Atom called Wind River Platform for Automotive Infotainment. This week, the technology was formally adopted as a reference design for a standardized in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system by a new automotive infotainment alliance among car manufacturers and suppliers called the Genivi Alliance.

Both firms are founding members of the alliance, which hopes to develop middleware and standards-compliant hardware designs to help reduce costs and improve time to market for in-car navigation and entertainment systems. In addition, last summer Wind River announced a MID Platform for Moblin-based mobile Internet devices based on the Atom.

Stated Jonathan Walsh, GM and group director of software engineering, Embedded and Communications Group, at Intel, “To address the growing software complexity and harness the multi-processing capabilities inherent in Intel architecture, this development between Intel and Wind River will help accelerate the deployment of multicore and low power Intel architecture.”

Stated John Bruggeman, CMO at Wind River, “The pace of multicore technology adoption has been slowed because hardware and software vendors have not been collaborating at this level.”

 
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