"We feel we have secured industry-wide support from key players to maximize the benefits of the Intel® Personal Internet Client Architecture and to provide our mutual customers [automotive manufacturers] with the best telematics development platforms available," said Pat Kerrigan, director of Intel’s In-Car Computing Operations.

Members of the Intel Team
Microsoft will offer its Windows CE for Automotive software platform, which currently supports the Intel StrongARM processor and later this year the Intel XScale microarchitecutre. According to the software giant, the Windows CE for Automotive is being enabled for personalized Web services development as part of the Microsoft. NET initiative.

Wind River will provide development tools supporting Intel’s architectures, including Tornado® integrated development environment (IDE) and VxWorks® real-time operating system (RTOS).

Besides the middleware connecting in-car computers with large networks, IBM will offer its VisualAge® MicroEdition Java application development tools and deployment technologies for the Intel StrongARM SA-1110 processor and Intel XScale-based products. In addition, IBM’s Embedded ViaVoice™ products will support Intel microarchitectures to deliver robust voice recognition and text-to-speech solutions.

Fonix Corporation and Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products are developing speech recognition technologies on the Intel microarchitectures.

Even with an impressive line-up of players, the Intel team is up against some stiff competition from the likes of OnStar, General Motor’s dashboard technology division, and will for a while have to play catch-up.