MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwire – 11/10/09) – Cavium Networks (NASDAQ:CAVM – News), a leading provider of highly integrated semiconductor products that enable intelligent processing for networking, wireless, storage and video applications, today announced that it is has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MontaVista Software for $50 million, comprised of approximately $16 million in cash and approximately $34 million in Cavium Networks common stock.

Not much of a return on $90 at least $90 million of investment – although to be fair, some of that investment was from semiconductor companies that took it out in services, so to speak.

Yodaiken’s Rule: Anyone can create a $50M/year break even embedded Linux services company given enough investment.

(Thanks to JK for the snotty punctuation remark. Feh).

Kendo enforces a deterministic interleaving of lock acquisitions and specially declared non-protected reads through a novel dynamically load-balanced deterministic scheduling algorithm. The algorithm tracks the progress of each thread using performance counters to construct a deterministic logical time that is used to compute an interleaving of shared data accesses that is both deterministic and provides good load balancing. Kendo can run on today’s commodity hardware while incurring only a modest performance cost ( http://www.gigascale.org/pubs/1883/asplos073-olszewski.pdf)

There is similarly motivated work on Java going on at UIC: http://dpj.cs.uiuc.edu/DPJ/Home.html

Both works refer to Lee’s paperwhich I discussed earlier. Nondeterministic threading is a  historical accident in computer engineering. Operating systems introduced time-sharing methods so single thread programs could be run in parallel during I/O delays and then so that multiple users could reasonably fairly share a processor and then so the OS and service programs could provide multiple services to a user at the price of slowing down user applications.  Exposing this system to users has been a mixed blessing. Certainly in the controls world, non-determinism is a dangerous fault.

If anything, Wind River’s inability to breakout, despite a once Microsoft-like position of dominance, is a by-product of their failure to meaningfully go “up the stack” and away from their historical focus on the silicon layer as a primary differentiation point.

In other words, if Wind River had enabled the next generation of Cisco and Apple killers by providing more differentiated OEM-in-a-Box offerings, ala what Google is now trying to do with Android, they would not be staring at a $900M market cap and relatively flat revenues, margins and stock price.

Well, that’s an argument. Embedded is a tough beat, but Wind did not exactly set the world on fire developing new concepts and software. Intel’s history in software is not glorious either – so it’s going to be an interesting challenge for the new entity.