Enea Demonstrates High-Performance Alternative to TIPC at Freescale Technology Forum; LINX Interprocess Communications (IPC) Technology Outstrips TIPC in Key Latency and Throughput Benchmarks.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Enea (STO:ENEA), the world leader in advanced device software, today announced that it will demonstrate its new high-performance LINX interprocess communications (IPC) technology at the Freescale Technology Forum. Using an adaptation of the standard TIPC interprocess communications (IPC) benchmarking programs, Enea will showcase the superior latency and throughput characteristics of its LINX message passing IPC technology. Enea will perform the demo at Enea Pod #1604.

"LINX is the best IPC technology for building complex distributed software in the industry," said Mike Christofferson, director of product management at Enea. "LINX is faster, more efficient, and more flexible than TIPC or TCP, scales from DSPs to 64-bit CPUs, and can handle any cluster topology. It's also open source. We believe that developers who evaluate both LINX and TIPC will find that LINX offers the superior IPC technology, regardless of the target operating system or CPU."

Interprocess Communications (IPC) is an industry term that refers to the mechanisms and protocols that operating systems use to facilitate communications between multiple processes or tasks, which are the building blocks for applications. LINX and TIPC utilize a technology known as message passing, which provides a flexible, scalable, device- and application-independent means of facilitating communications between tasks, whether they reside on a single processor, or are spread across multiple processors, blades and shelves. Other popular IPC approaches include mailboxes and shared memory, less flexible technologies often used for tightly coupled communications between tasks residing on a single processor or blade.

The Enea demo features a pair of Freescale 8548 processors running MontaVista Linux, and connected via Gigabit Ethernet. Enea's LINX runs atop MontaVista Linux, providing IPC services for communications between the two processors. The latency test measures the round-trip time needed to send and return (to the sender) a single message. The throughput test measures the maximum data transfer rate at 100% CPU utilization for messages sent to a receiver, which discards the messages. Both tests are performed over a range of message sizes, from 64 bytes to 64 kbytes. Both benchmarks are included in the standard LINX distribution, so that customers may do their own performance measurements and comparisons.

LINX is a scalable, high-performance, transparent message passing IPC service for complex, heterogeneous distributed systems utilizing multiple operating systems and processors. LINX employs a lightweight connection protocol that greatly enhances performance relative to competitive IPC protocols. Relative to TIPC, for example, LINX provides, on average, 25% lower latency and 20% higher throughput for intra-node IPC, and 10% lower latency and 25% higher throughput for internode IPC.

LINX is the only IPC technology that scales from DSPs and microcontrollers to 64-bit CPUs. LINX is also operating system (i.e., Linux, OSE, and other RTOSes) and media/interconnect independent (i.e., Gigabit Ethernet, RapidIO, PCI and shared memory). This flexibility and transparency enables LINX to accommodate diverse network configurations, from a single processor on a single blade, to large networks with complex cluster topologies deployed on hundreds of processors in a multi-rack system. It also makes distributed systems easier to scale, port and reconfigure, with few if any changes to the application code.

About Enea

Enea (STO:ENEA) is the leading supplier of real-time operating systems, middleware, development tools, database technology and professional services for high-availability distributed multiprocessing applications such as telecommunications infrastructure, mobile devices, medical instrumentation, and automobile control/infotainment. Enea's flagship operating system, OSE is deployed in approximately half of the world's 3G mobile phones and base stations. Enea has over 500 employees and is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. For further information on Enea, please visit www.enea.com.