Embedded Systems Conference micro-report

[mdlbear]

The ESC is back in San Jose this year -- convenient as heck for me, since the convention center is just a ten-minute drive down W. San Carlos. It was raining this morning, so I drove down thinking that I'd be able to use my car for storage. So did everyone else; by the time I got there the garage was full. So I turned around and had the flower_cat drive me over in the Cat Bus.

It might have been a little smaller than last year, not clear. Less Linux, or at least fewer distributions -- MontaVista was the only Linux pure play, with dual-OS LynuxWorks (LynxOS and Linux) and Wind River (VxWorks and Linux) as the other major Linux vendors. RedHat wasn't there this year. IBM was there, and of course they're mostly a Linux house these days. Sun was there, showing a real-time Java (no RT garbage collector yet -- you can mark certain threads as non-gc'd). Eclipse had a big presence, and while there were a couple of other IDEs, there weren't nearly as many as there were a couple of years ago. There was a recent survey suggesting that Linux is be in a (hopefully temporary) decline in the embedded space, but most of the tool and board vendors still support it. Sampling bias?

There were a lot of mini-ITX boards, including PowerPC and Pentium M as well as Via. And a sprinkling of the new nano-ITX, and of course the usual collection of smaller form-factors. I may very well end up with a Pentium M in my next recording-system upgrade; they run fanless up to about 1.4GHz and have better floating-point performance than the VIA's.

Swag was good -- better than last year. Highlights were a stainless-steel thermos bottle from Mentor Graphics, a 512MB USB stick from power.org, and a USB-powered coffee warmer from Aonix. Not surprisingly, they sell a Java runtime. I'll probably use it for tea, since I use an insulated mug for coffee these days. My conclusion from this is that business is improving.