Embedded

National Instruments wants to shift the focus for many embedded systems designers away from hardware cost optimization towards graphical programming as a way of reducing the time it takes to get targets up, running and productive.

Embedded hardware and software are experiencing exciting advances but free, open source technologies only go so far in connecting them. Help is on the way.

In a deal that pits the company head to head with ARM, Imagination Technologies has decided to buy the business of MIPS Technologies including the CPU architectures and cores. The price tag is $60m cash.

ARM is among the companies aiming to avoid a patent portfolio falling into the wrong hands after the break up of MIPS Technologies.

Xmos is going back to its roots as a microprocessor architecture designed specifically for low-latency, real-time applications.

Altera has launched the first first SDK to take OpenCL software and target it to FPGAs rather than general-purpose processors or graphics processors.

A group of companies based in the UK have formed a group that hopes to develop and promote standards for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications that employ gaps in radio spectrum rather than relying on dedicated frequency bands.

ARM has named the first pair of processor cores that employ its 64bit architecture and revealed that an architectural clean-up is likely to result in the smaller of the pair requiring less silicon real estate than the existing 32bit Cortex-A9.

AMD adopts ARM64 to promote heterogeneous processing and encourage users to break with Intel and x86 in the enterprise market.

The Object Management Group has adopted the Vector Signal and Image Processing Library (VSIPL) for C and VSIPL++ for C++ as standard specifications that it will manage and promote.