The majority of developers working on embedded systems in North America and Asia Pacific regions are planning to migrate to a different hardware architecture, a new survey claims. Despite what some might have expected, the beneficiary is Intel — being targeted by 29 percent or 34 percent of developers in those respective regions, according to Evans Data Corporation (EDC).

The newly touted results from EDC's second Global Development survey of 2010 will no doubt comfort Intel executives, who recently had to react to Microsoft's announcement that it will port "big Windows" to ARM processors. (In another weighty development, Intel agreed yesterday to pay $1.5 billion to ARM licensee Nvidia, ending legal sniping between the companies and permitting development of integrated GPUs using the latter's intellectual property.)

While it might seem that embedded developers are flocking to the power-saving ARM architecture, this is not the case — at least not in North America and the Asia Pacific, according to EDC. The research firm says the majority of developers it surveyed are planning to migrate from one hardware architecture to another; but of those, the largest pluralities (34 percent in Asia Pacific, 29 percent in North America) say they're moving in Intel's direction.

According to the Global Development survey highlights released by EDC, the EMEA region (Europe Middle East and Africa) was the only region in which a majority of embedded systems developers said they did not plan to migrate. It was also the only region in which ARM was the most-cited (27 percent) architecture for those who would be migrating.

Janel Garvin, CEO of Santa Cruz, Calif.-based Evans Data Corp, stated, "ARM's strength is in Europe where they have long cultivated a strong following of developers. However, Intel has the edge in North America, and has apparently swept the fast growing Asia-Pacific region as well, where we actually see the stronger intentions for Intel adoption than in any other region."

According to EDC's release, "IBM" was also recognized by developers as a likely migration target for embedded systems, placing second in every region. No details of the CPUs or operating systems implied in that choice were provided, however.

Windows 7 is top development OS

Regarding the operating systems employed by embedded developers to do their work, EDC says Microsoft's Windows XP has finally been displaced after a ten-year reign. Now, Windows 7 has "reached a dominant position in development shops," according to the firm, which says the OS is the choice of more than 30 percent.

As shown in the table above, Windows XP is still a strong second, with 29.3 percent, while — somewhat surprisingly, perhaps — the oft-maligned Vista is the choice of 13.2 percent. The latter was enough to outpace Linux, selected by 11.1 percent of developers.

Other survey highlights cited by EDC include:

• 28 percent of North American developers are using HTML5 and another 48.9% intend to
• almost half (48.8%) of developers in APAC plan to target mobile device screens
• Java is considered the top "mash-up" language in EMEA with over 30% preferring it

Further information

EDC's complete Global Development Survey for the second half of 2010 has 235 pages and was compiled with the assistance of more than 490 correspondents. Pricing was not provided, but a table of contents and three sample pages may be downloaded from the North American Development Survey 2010 v. 2 product page (registration required).

This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.