XMOS, in partnership with Amazon, announces the release of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) FreeRTOS, enabling electronics manufacturers to build complex embedded systems faster and more easily than ever before.
With significant contributions from XMOS and other partners, this all-new SMP version marks a step-change in the capabilities of the FreeRTOS kernel, with verification and maintenance provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Traditionally driven by the community, the widely known MIT-licensed open-source FreeRTOS is downloaded every 170 seconds by developers around the world. It brings a whole host of benefits for electronics manufacturers in terms of ease of use, design reuse, and speed.
FreeRTOS offers a homogenous and scalable programming interface that can be trusted to run existing and future workloads. Now, for the first time in an upstream version, developers can work within a familiar FreeRTOS environment using symmetric multiprocessing to program multicore architectures – simultaneously saving considerable time and money, and helping to improve speed to market.
SMP FreeRTOS will be available to use on XMOS’s flexible and powerful xcore chipset, which brings together AI, control, communications, and DSP in an affordable, performant package. xcore is already widely used as a fast, simple, and cost-effective route to creating intelligent devices across a wide variety of applications. XMOS’s recently released XTC tools, paired with the symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) implementation of FreeRTOS, take advantage of xcore’s unique capabilities through easy-to-use industry-standard software language and abstraction.