About 6-7 years ago, Wind River was a big player in embedded software. And then embedded linux came along and disrupted their market. Like most incumbents, they moved to the new paradigm (ie. embedded linux) very slowly and at one point, they were stuck in the uneviable position of maintaining their proprietary OS and linux at the same time (ie. double development costs). Back then, the outlook for them wasn't good in light of the trend of embedded electronics manufacturers moving to linux.<p>Anyway, that was back then. It's been a while since I was in that industry, so I don't know what the recent history is.
I read this morning that Wind River make an embedded OS for ARM based processors, which is used by many of Intel's competitors in the netbook market. Looks like a strategic move from Intel.
What're the odds of intel trying to develop some x86 extensions (read: new instructions + other hardware optimizations) that'd be better-suited to doing hard-realtime (or at least "low latency") embedded work, and then making sure at least VxWorks + Wind River's linux flavors worked with it?<p>Have there been any rumors to that effect?
They were headed that way for a while now, chapter 11 or being acquired. From what I remember they were in deep trouble since the beginning of this year (laying off people) ....