Editorial 2Q99
In the last issue, you discovered preliminary
results of the ongoing RTOS market survey available on our Website. Today
we have over 2300 registrations. We thought this was sufficient for breaking
down market trends between North America, Europe, and the rest of the world.
We discovered interesting differences between these parts of the world.
Wind River’s Tornado is definitely the market leader. However, the lead
in North America is much more significant than in Europe and the rest of
the world.
Windows NT (2nd position) is constantly present. As we have already
stated in one of our previous issues, Windows NT, as it is today, is not
suitable for real-time applications. Nevertheless, the market wants these
products. This has several consequences:
- These products might evolve, due to market pressure, towards RTOS, as it should be. However this certainly won't take place before the next two years or so.
- People seem not to have a clear definition of what real-time is all about and are still thinking that being “fast” is enough to solve real-time requirements. Consequently, people who are actually designing with NT are discovering problems that cause them to upgrade to the real-time extensions offered by various companies.
If you study the details in the market report article, you will also find out that the differences in market share in the various parts of the world are related to the “effort” a manufacturer deploys to market and sell the product in that region. A typical example is OSE, which is initially a European product. It appears in the European graph, but not in the other ones yet. The same can be said about uITRON which is only in the “outside NA & EUROPE” picture. SPOX has only a (small) market share in North America and this brings us to the subject of this issue: Digital Signal Processing (DSP).
With the information you will find in this magazine, we want to add our contribution to the question: “should you use DSPs or general purpose processors?” Indeed by chatting with some of our readers, we found out that many of them, who made the DSP choice, were sometimes very disappointed by the performance of the system. They also discovered that using a PPC processor provided them with better performance. All this depends to a large extent on the functionality of the system. As soon as there are “general purpose” functions to perform, DSPs encounter problems. The availability of RTOS and development environments for these processors is still very limited.
In the future, one might expect new processors to integrate both general purpose and DSP functionality. This will definitely solve today’s problem. For the time being, going for a multiprocessor approach is probably the solution, each processor serving its purpose. Mezzanine boards with embedded DSP may help you build such a solution.
