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Anand Parthasarathy

Wind River embraces Linux, unveils debugging tools

Bangalore , Dec. 4

If you thought multiple cores on a single silicon slab began with Intel and AMD's announcements of two, and lately four, processors on a chip, think again.

Every `smart' mobile phone is a multi-core device - and has been for some years, over 200 geeks at a developer conference in Bangalore were told on Monday.

That is because such phones typically house two processors: one to handle the telecom tasks and the other to look after the applications. That is why you can view broadband video streams and take a voice call at the same time.

At a day-long conference hosted by Wind River, a US-based company in the emerging niche of device software optimisaton (DSO), Mr Vinay Panchdhari, Taiwan-based Regional Field Application Engineer, said that multi-core devices have been around for a decade - though it is the coming years that their number is likely to see sharp escalation.

Intel has said that it is possible to see 80 separate processor cores on a chip within five years.

The processing and timing requirements of today's applications cannot be satisfied by a single processor on a chip: The fastest they can work is under 4GHz - that is, four billion times a second, which is where the Pentium hit a wall and forced its maker to go dual core.

"We are no longer an operating system company," said Wind River's India Country Manager, Mr Venkatesh Kumaran, shedding the image of the company as creator of the VxWorks programming environment.

It has now firmly embraced Linux and now offers an open source option to developers who have to address the challenge of housing up to 128 processors on a chip.

Wind River's mantra is "plug-and-play shouldn't mean plug-and-pray. The happenstance should be taken out of chip development."

To do this, the company unveiled its road map of solutions for running multiple operating systems off a single chip.

New offerings

The first application to flow from these new offerings is likely to be the next generation of multi-function-printers that can be remotely managed even as they print, copy, fax or scan.

Mr Andrew Caples, Worldwide Director of Sales (Hardware-Assisted Tools), unveiled a range of debugging tools for the next generation of multi-core processors coming from the likes of Intel, Broadcom, MIPS and ARM.

Some of the tools - like the Wind River Probe - have been packaged to be as easy as plugging a tester into the USB port of the board under test.

Many of Wind River's latest offerings, especially in the device software management space, have been crafted by its development team based in Bangalore.

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