Express Logic’s ThreadX 5.2 Delivers Increased Speed

Among the most critical values of an RTOS is its real-time performance, which enables applications to perform faster, be more responsive, and run with less overhead. Based on the RTOS-independent Thread-Metric Benchmark Suite, which measures RTOS real-time performance, ThreadX V5.2 delivers faster processing speed across the board, with the best improvements noted in the area of message processing. Previously achieving a total of 6,928,383 iterations of the Thread-Metric message processing test, ThreadX V5.2 now scores top marks with 7,853,195 iterations, a 13.3% performance increase. Other Thread-Metric scores increased from 1% to 12%.

Equally important to embedded systems is memory footprint. Already one of the smallest RTOSes on the market, with an overall ROM footprint as low as 2K bytes, ThreadX 5.2 reduces its minimal RAM requirements for global memory, bringing the minimal RAM requirement of ThreadX to an amazingly small 364 bytes! This tiny footprint is ideal for SoC applications, where memory resources are extremely limited and where ThreadX traditionally has been widely used.

All ThreadX architectures and tools versions now support Express Logic’s TraceX® graphical event analysis tool that helps developers visualize the behavior of their real-time systems. ThreadX developers using Green Hills MULTI® development tools are no longer limited to Green Hills’ EventAnalyzer, but now can also elect to use TraceX.

“By improving its speed and reducing its footprint, we have geared ThreadX up for the next-generation of embedded devices that will pack even more functionality into a smaller space,” commented William E. Lamie, president and CEO of Express Logic. “Along with BenchX, our award-winning Eclipse-based IDE, and TraceX, our new graphical event analysis tool, ThreadX V5.2 will enable embedded developers to be better equipped to meet the tight timelines that these designs demand.”

Often a particular set of events are of interest to developers as they struggle to optimize an application. Unfortunately, most event analysis programs log and display all events, including many that are irrelevant to a developer’s current optimization effort. With ThreadX V5.2’s new ability to provide dynamic event filtering, each category of events can be enabled or disabled dynamically, allowing the developer to focus on a particular sub-set of events. Event filtering reduces the clutter of unnecessary events, allowing more pertinent events to be logged and displayed, so developers are able to quickly find the most relevant information for their current investigation.

ThreadX V5.2 also introduces a generic SMP framework, making ThreadX more portable to new multicore environments. Currently, the ThreadX/SMP version for the MIPS 34K takes full advantage of this new SMP foundation in ThreadX V5.2.