NUREMBURG, GERMANY: Wind River and Intel will collaborate to market optimized multi-core solutions for the embedded market by aligning R&D, sales and marketing, professional services, and engineering resources.

The two companies will initially target the aerospace and defense, network infrastructure, industrial, medical and print imaging market segments.

The collaboration will focus on advancing market plans for four primary technology optimizations that enable transitions to multicore:
* Optimization of Wind River VxWorks and Wind River Linux on Embedded Intel architecture processors;
* Optimization of Wind River's hypervisor technology for Intel processors including full utilization of Intel Virtualization Technology (VT);
* Increased interoperability of development tools for analysis and tuning of multi-core devices; and
* Integration of Intel compiler and performance primitives into Wind River multi-core software platforms for Intel processors.

"The pace of multicore technology adoption has been slowed because hardware and software vendors have not been collaborating at this level," said John Bruggeman, chief marketing officer at Wind River. "Now two industry leaders are coming together to address the challenges associated with enabling software for multicore processors. Our plan to provide co-developed, highly optimized solutions will provide a unique advantage to our joint customers."

The companies have already begun joint development as part of the agreement. Wind River is expanding VxWorks symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) support for Intel Core2 and Intel Xeon processors, and support of Wind River's Workbench and On-Chip Debugging development suite for Intel Core2 and Intel Atom processors. Further, the companies have collaborated to deliver customer-specific requests for asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) support on Intel Core2 processors. Wind River also demonstrated its hypervisor technology on the Intel Atom processor Z530 platform this week at Embedded World in Nuremburg, Germany.

"Intel has a long history of delivering powerful processor architectures to meet the performance and functionality demands of the embedded market," said Jonathan Walsh, general manager and group director of software engineering of the Embedded and Communications Group at Intel. "To address the growing software complexity and harness the multi-processing capabilities inherent in Intel architecture, this development between Intel and Wind River will help accelerate the deployment of multicore and low power Intel architecture."

The announcement builds on an existing relationship between the two companies to provide alignment across the embedded market segment. Last year the two companies announced agreements to deliver Linux-based platforms for the In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) and Mobile Internet Device (MID) markets and optimized for the Intel Atom processor.

Wind River and Intel are among the founding members of the GENIVI Alliance, a non-profit organization committed to driving the development and broad adoption of an open source IVI reference platform, which was announced on March 2, 2009. Through these engagements, Wind River and Intel created a model for collaborating on vertical market solutions, which is now being extended to a horizontal offering around multi-core.