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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up!
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To: Bala Vasireddi who wrote (6096)8/17/1999 1:52:00 PM
From: Ronald Paul  Read Replies (2) of 10309
 
Front page of the August 9 EE-Times:
"Linux dons Hard Hat for embedded play" by Craig Matsumoto

Maybe others can post the url for the article, I read the hardcopy. A very interesting article for several reasons. The bottom-line for me is that WIND's sandbox will grow, but will be bounded.

Any OS-knowledgable WIND investor interested in how this may affect WIND's business should take the time to read it.

What I got out of it relates to several burning questions I've harbored and at times posted to this thread. One has to do with the fact that a significant percentage of WIND's competition are roll-yer-owns. In this article, a credible argument was made that embedded Linux will be the right choice for many of these systems.

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.

A key take-away for me was - WIND's future depends on the growth of truly "hard" systems IMO. Embedded systems will grow at a remarkable pace, but the growth rate of hard real-time will be mitigated by Moore's Law.
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