>does this article on FORCE computers and embedded software
>have any relation or any effect on WIND?
Not much. SUNW wants very much to be a player in embedded systems, be it microprocessors or software. The UltraSparc i-series may be useful addition to the world of embedded processors, and it may be attractive to the Unix/Solaris community, but overall this has less impact than PC's in a box using MSDOS or Windows NT.
The world of sophisticated embedded systems needs, and therefore demands, a standard operating system, with a standard API, with standard tools, and access to all available COTS add-on capabilities in software and hardware. That operating system is not Sun's Solaris. It is not Windows CE, nor Windows NT. There is growing evidence that it is VxWorks. By the same token, each of these operating systems, and many others, will be used in numerous projects, particularly for prototyping concepts.
No doubt WIND will simply add the new series of embedded processors from Sun to their growing, lengthy list of supported processors - the ports of which are all paid for by the chip makers. This means that Sun should be contracting WIND to port VxWorks to the new microprocessor, or risk losing important design wins. In other words, if the new series of processors became popular, then most of them will end up being used with VxWorks.
Did you know that VxWorks has been used to extend Sun computers for real-time applications in the past. For example, the military air traffic control engaged a company to build a real-time computer for terminal radar control (TRACON). As I was told, the computer consisted of a Sun workstation, extended by having VxWorks running on add-in processors.
Allen |
