Nicely summarized. Your views confirm mine.
The GM contract is for all diesel vehicles, essentially trucks. They also will begin putting the 16-bit Siemens version of VxWorks in GM transmission starting in the year 2000.
The Microsoft at Work story is interesting, since they apparently had over 200 people on the project, and arm-twisted most office product vendors into agreeing to participate, until finally the venture collapsed from its own weight. Very bad design. I like the story because it confirms the difficulty of competing successfully in the RTOS arena, and I love high barriers to entry.
When you say INTS has lots of automobile business, are you referring to MatrixX design, or pSOS applications. My guess is they only, or mainly, have MatrixX design work. I have never seen an announcement of any other type of automobile application by INTS, or anyone other than WIND for that matter. Recall that GM uses 16-bit MCU’s for these purposes, as probably do most automobile manufacturers, and I have never heard of official pSOS being ported to a 16-bit microprocessor (although a German firm did a pSOS port to a 16-bit Siemens chip).
If you saw the same I2O ad I saw, did you notice it directly implied that both the i960RP will reside alongside the Pentium chip on the motherboard - more than suggestive of the next generation of PC design? I asked Intel about that and they confirm that the i960RP should start to appear on the motherboard early in 1997, and on OEM add-ons in the second half of 1996.
Allen |
