Unlike the desktop marketplace, most of the consumer/embedded market place is driven more by cost than by Moore's law: 28MB of memory is always going to cost more than 500KB, so a Linux solution will always be more expensive than a VxWorks solution, as long as the VxWorks runtime royalties are less than the differential cost of memory.
Moore's law (if I recall correctly) applies only to CPU speed: it does not say anything about being able to squeeze double the memory on half the chip, for half the cost, and even if it did, less memory will still cost less. Windows CE has the same competitive problems in terms of memory requirements, and will be doubly hurt by the royalties Microsoft will want to extract for its use.
The consumer/embedded market place is driven even harder by schedule, which rules out the "no cost" no-os solution that companies often try to use. This is where VxWorks really enables developers: it's always the first RTOS on any new embedded platform.
My conclusion: VxWorks will play an increasingly important role in the consumer/embedded market place. You can draw your own.
P.
Another point made in this article is related to how Moore's Law is affecting the embedded marketplace. In other words, "hard real-time processing often isn't required, and in many cases it's rendered irrelevant by processor speeds." as Matsumoto states.
Granted, Mr. Matsumoto also points out that Linux was not designed for hard real-time (kernel requires extensions,etc), still has a huge footprint (MonteVista team got it down to 28 Megs of RAM, decompressed from 11.8 Megs on ROM, with 8 Megs of user memory required minimum)- still exponentially bigger than what many hard real-time systems are constrained to. |
