We just announced that ORBexpress now supports Wind River's VxWorks 6.9 with full symmetric multiprocessing capability. A lot of our customers are letting us know that they believe their next projects, or the next generation of their existing projects, will use a multicore processor. All you need to do is look at how smartphones are developing. The current trend is to move to dual-core ARM processors, and there are already quad-core ARM processors available.

In order to keep battery usage and heat down, it makes much more sense to add additional cores without dramatically ramping up the GHz of the processor. That way, you get a lot more MIPS (millions of instructions per second) without eating up battery life. This is one of the many benefits of the relentless march of Moore's Law.

ORBexpress was designed, architected and built from the very beginning to optimize processing distributed over multiple processors. Its native multi-threaded architecture is ideal for multicore applications. This means that software developers using multi-threaded ORBexpress in an application running on a single core processor can reap the benefits of moving to a multicore processor without rewriting their application. They literally need to change only one line of code to enable dramatic performance improvements (assuming that the underlying operating system supports multicore).

Feel free to contact us to learn more about the specific performance improvements that your system might realize in using ORBexpress.

Joe