Windows CE 6.0 unleashed on the world

AS REPORTED EARLIER, today, November 1st, is the launch date for the sixth major version of Windows CE, on the tenth anniversary of the original launch of CE. It comes complete with a thoroughly silly name lengthening, as vital for any up-to-date piece of software, so should now be known as Microsoft (R) Windows (R) Embedded CE 6.0. So there you go.

Snide remarks about the ever growing names that even the MS employees seemed able to remember aside, CE 6 appears to be a pretty major upgrade, so we took the opportunity to sit through today's launch presentation by Craig Mundie, and to have a chat with spokesvoles Hardy Poppinger and David Baker.

In a nutshell, there are a few things to note about CE 6:

• The Kernel has been re-written from scratch and, as we reported, can now support up to 32,000 simultaneous processes each with a 2GB virtual memory space.
• To have a go at Linux + GPL code, 100% of the kernel is now shared source, with developers able to modify without any requirements to give their source back to the community (aka your competitors), like companies such as TomTom have had to do with their Linux platform. Some, but not all libraries are also shared source, but you are 100% kept idemnified against being sued for copyright infringement.
• All of platform builder is now integrated in Visual Studio, meaning that you have a single dev environment with all the collaborative working features available. When you buy your $995 CE 6 Platform Builder licence, it now includes Visual Studio as well, rather than the lesser Embedded Visual C++ bundled with CE 5.
• Several templates and libraries are now included to help reduce the efforts needed to bang together a product for one of their target markets, such as wireless projectors, digital media frames, GPS / automotive systems, networked devices and set top boxes.
• Despite the capability enhancements, performance has remained the same or improved on the new kernel. This means that realtime, deterministic code is still able to run on CE, which is not something that XP can manage without expensive add-on code.
• Vole are guaranteeing 10 years support for CE 6 to challenge the VXworks and QNXs of this world.

The volume licencing model is similar to the previous version, with core licences being around $3, and the professional version up to $15.

So what does all this mean, one may wonder? Well an interesting statistic is that x86 only counts for only around two per cent of all processors and microcontrollers shipped in the world. Most of these have traditionally been 8 bit, but there is a massive, massive growth in 32-bit non x86 shipments. With the performance and features of the kernel creeping up into the same area, I think there's a big overlap coming up.

My personal suspicion therefore is that it will not be long before the vole ships more licences of CE than it does of XP or Vista - pretty interesting stuff. µ