Last year Wind River, the embedded OS maven soon to become an Intel outpost, said it would get in the virtualization game and beta tested a hypervisor.

Tuesday the Wind River Hypervisor came out.

It was described as key to the way the company deals with the multi-core processors that are increasingly finding their way into embedded devices.

The move puts Wind River in competition with other embedded virtualization vendors such as VirtualLogix, OKLabs and Trango.

The hypervisor currently integrates with Wind River's proprietary RTOS VxWorks and commercial-grade Wind River Linux running - as it happens - on Intel's Nehalem, Core 2 and Atom chips as well as IBM's PowerPC.

Support for other operating systems such as Android and Limo as well as Mips and ARM chips will follow at some point.

The company's Eclipse-based Workbench tools have been extended to develop software that runs on the hypervisor.

Widgets used in network hardware, consumer electronics, industrial, aerospace and defense applications and cars are expected to take advantage of the hypervisor.

Virtualization can be used to secure a device's main operating system and to run functions on others; users can also leverage existing software. Virtualization can also be used to collapse multiple boards or CPUs into one and reduce the complexity of working with multi-core processors.

The company says it will reduce power consumption along with hardware costs and accelerate time-to-market.

The hypervisor will run on both single- and multi-core chips and support SMP, asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) and supervised AMP.

CTO Tomas Evensen said the hypervisor derived from ARINC 653, the Avionics Application Standard Software Interface, a software specification for space and time partitioning.