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Intel Launches 'Galileo,' an Arduino-Compatible Mini Computer
MojoKid writes "Although Intel is Chipzilla, the company can't help but extend its reach just a bit into the exciting and growing world of DIY makers and hobbyists. Intel announced its Galileo development board, a microcontroller that's compatible with Arduino software and uses the new Quark X1000 processor (400MHz, 32-bit, Pentium-class, single- core and thread) that Intel announced at the IDF 2013 keynote. The board makes use of Intel's architecture to make it easy to develop for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but it's also completely open hardware (PDF). Galileo is 10cm x 7cm (although ports protrude a bit beyond that), and there are four screw holes for secure mounting. Ports include 10/100 Ethernet, USB client/host ports, RS-232 UART and 3.5mm jack, mini PCIe slot (with USB 2.0 host support); other features include 8MB Legacy SPI Flash for firmware storage, 512KB embedded SRAM, 256MB DRAM, 11KB EEPROM programmed via the EEPROM library, and support for an additional 32GB of storage using a microSD card."
I know there will be haters, but the more corporate interest and entries in this category the better in my opinion. And if it happens to forward the interests of Intel, more power to them.
It might be Arduino compatible but not price wise. With all those things sounds like expensive.
"low cost" - how low exactly?
Mini Computer? Inigo Montoya says, "I don't think that word means what you think it means."
Why call it a "mini computer" when that is so confusingly close to the well-understood term "minicomputer"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minicomputer
There are lots of little boards available. With reasonable CPUs and amounts of memory. Ardunos, with 2K or 8K of RAM, were just too limited.
On the other hand, having to run bloatware like Windows or Linux on an embedded board has its own headaches.
Wow, imagine a Beowolf Cluster of these!
Ummmm, what about the most important features of the arduino: digital I/O pins, analog input and PWM output? It looks like there might be some in the picture, but the specs don't mention anything at all...
Are the specifications for communication protocol over the JTAG port open? Will projects like OpenOCD (http://openocd.sourceforge.net/) have enough information to support this?
Sure they might have used a standard connector. But the devil is in the details.
Finding Small Intel based systems that are also cheap is a problem. Some of the fanless solutions cost around $500 a go.
Not cheap by any standard.
By contrast ARM versions are a lot cheaper.
With the advent of ARM-64 CPU's they will threaten Intel in this area.
The 1960s - 1970s minicomputer was gone by 1985. Thirty years later, there's no confusion and therefore no reason not to reuse the term.
For crying out loud, the one thing that moves these things, and nowhere in sight.
The main thing about the Arduino is its low power consumption - it is possible to embed it in just about anything and have it tag along nicely for a long ass time on a simple battery.. any idea about the Intel thing? (also, via china, lets remember that a perfectly functional Arduino clone can be had for $7 with postage, its pretty freaking hard to beat that!)
Imagine what would happen if Atmel could develop a low cost solution that could emulate this in hardware.
Nullius in verba
Sorry but the hardware isn't open unless you can build it without involving Intel. I highly doubt that Intel is publishing the documents needed to go to another fab (e.g. TSMC, Samsung) to have the SoC made.
Can it run FreeDOS? That would make certain development much easier for me.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
I run a Linux appliance with 4MB of RAM as a VPN endpoint for my kvm, ipmi, pdu, etc. I don't consider 10 cents of RAM "bloated".
Sure for some things you don't need an operating system, but if having Linux saves five minutes of development time it may be worth the extra $5 of hardware.
Obviously if you plan to sell a million units of a particular design, omitting 10 cents worth of RAM from each saves you $100K. For hobbyists, 4MB of RAM to run Linux is very often worth it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_4004
The 4004 gave rise to the z80, the 8008, 8080, and 8086 chips that before the IBM PC came along were mainstays in the hobbyist community. It was all hobbyist, all the time back then, and heady days. So wouldn't it be fairer to say that Intel is going back to its roots rather than "reaching just a bit" in the DIY and hobbyist arena?
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
when I can download the make files and 3D print my own. It's the future.
Where I come from, mini-computers are the size of refrigerators. That's one there on my lawn. Now get the hell off!
When are they going to make low power, as in runs for months on batteries, versions of these things?
If you want to discuss definitions, I'd like to know where you prefer to draw the line between a mini and a micro.
8MB of flash for firmware? I have a 3mm x 5mm mini SD chip (size includes packaging), that holds 16 GB! You could have all the operating system you want, plus extra support programs and drivers, *and* even storage space for data in 16GB. Why oh why would you put such a small chip on? I know the embedded industrial controller folk usually deal with miniscule amounts of ram, but in the world of data processing, those amounts are miniscule, and certainly if you want to do data logging with this thing, its likewise useless.
Will projects like OpenOCD
How many times do you have to wash your hands and open and close the door before you can use an Open On-Chip Debugger?
Sorry for Intel, but the just announced Arduino Tre is far better from any point of views.
http://blog.arduino.cc/2013/10/03/a-sneak-preview-of-arduino-tre/?utm_source=Arduino+World&utm_campaign=9f14cc4ca3-MakerFaire_World_201310_2_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_69a7d1abe4-9f14cc4ca3-76843037
* Run faster than the Intel solution: An Atom core yield the same code execution speed as an Cortex-A8 core at the same frequency, so 1GHz A8 will easily catch on a 0.4GHz ia32).
* Cheaper and simpler to design on a custom board: just look at the chip package and at the PCB routing...
* Simpler power supply design, again just look at the schematics and at the PCB.
* HDMI output.
* More I/O, and all are integrated directly into the two CPUs, not using peripheral chips with low bandwidth.
* Already supported by larges communities, for the two processors.
Intel is just trying to enter a new market with a big buzz, but there actual solution still far away from the concurrent solutions. There just don't understand that in the embedded market nobody is bounded to the ia32 instructions set. Integration is the key and there Quark X1000 don't bring anything new on the table.
That's allmost all that f'ing matters really. Give me a board where we have free software friendly BIOS, audio, 3d graphics drivers, video output, decent ram (2-4GB would be ideal or better yet memory slots so I can pick how much I want), SATA port, ethernet, and flash, please. I'll pay for it too. $150 isn't too much if you have all that.
While I like the idea of having an Arduino compatible board running Linux to do some more advanced projects, I don't understand what drove Intel to force this board to be Arduino compatible. The Quark processor is not designed for this sort of stuff as it has neither a sufficient number of GPIO pins nor any ADCs. It sure has a lot of interfaces (SPI, I2C, PCI-E, SD-Card, Serial etc.), but it lacks the things that are useful for a hacker project.
So they had to include a separate GPIO extender chip (over a slow I2C interconnect) as well as an separate ADC. The Quark SoC has some 15 GPIO Pins, the extender another 40. But of those 55 Pins only 20 GPIO pins are actually available on the Arduino shield pins -- the rest is used for all the Muxes to switch pins between the ADC, the GPIO Extender and the Quark SoC to emulate the flexibility of the Arduino AVR processor.
While I haven't looked at the actual PCB schematic, I think the board layout is also strange. The ADC is on the opposite side from the analog input pins, meaning that all analog signals have to travel a long distance in the vicinity of some high speed digital signals. And the GPIO Extender Chip is on the opposite corner from all the digital output pins.
This, together with the BGA devices (SoC, RAM), seem to indicate that this is at least an 6 layer board which will make it hard to clone this design -- something that IMHO has contributed to the success of the Arduino. The Schematic for this board has 27 pages compared to the single page of the Arduino Uno
It seems that this Board is designed more as a competitor to the Raspberry Pi than to the Arduino, both in price and in features.The Arduino compatibility is just some marketing thing which makes the board overly complex and more expensive than it needs to be.
But hey, it sure must be fun to employ a few million transistors and a full blown operating system to run the Arduino Blink demo :-)
X IMPRIMITE "SALVE TERRA!"
XX ITE AD X
Looking at the picture of the PCB they used, first question that strikes me - why not simply make it a single chip ASIC? I counted at least 7 chips on board. It would seem that a single chip w/ all the functions, and connections running out to all the ports - PCIe, USB, Ethernet, SPI and so on would enable Intel to minimize on chip cost, and let the rest of the cost hinge on the peripheral interfaces.
If that would be too expensive, Intel could make things cheaper by going as far back to a Pentium I core, or even something like an address/data multiplexed 486, but making sure that modern peripherals are supported. The main issue on older chips was that the CPU was really fast, but the peripherals pretty slow. Here, the peripherals could be as fast as the CPU, but since there's also a premium on battery life, the clock could be drawn back. Also, they could toss in some Centrino chip functionality so that Wi-Fi too got supported.
Such a system could support just about every x86 OS out there - FreeDOS, Windows, Linux, Minix, and so on. In fact, on such a system, a 32-bit version of FreeDOS could also be made.
The Galileo board looks fairly interesting, but have you seen the Intel Software License Agreement that you have to accept to download the Galileo software?
Apparently nobody told Intel's lawyers that this project was open source and open hardware, and that derivatives based on GPL-licensed sources cannot be encumbered by additional restrictions. That license agreement is completely out of step with everything else in the Arduino community, not to mention also being out of step with Intel's very strong support for Linux in all other areas.
(I expect this is just a temporary mistake by Intel, but it's a big one.)
Yes, let's see if we can fool everyone into thinking this is the same as arduino. Even though the reason behind arduino's success is that it is (L)GPL licensed.
Liberty.
i did an analysis of the Quark X1000 based on the Galileo schematics, and the assessment isn't good:
http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2013-October/008979.html
the key failure is that there's absolutely no I/O multiplexing. given that intel actually designed the PXA series of ARM processors before selling them to marvell you have to wonder what was going through the minds of the engineers behind the Quark X1000.
the main points of the above link which automatically and very unfortunately make the Quark X1000 a complete failure are:
1) there's no video outputs, and the only options are USB2 (DisplayLink with no 3D capabilities and too slow to do video), SPI (for character-based LCDs) or PCIe. to match a 0.4 watt processor with a 20 watt 3D PCIe Graphics card is completely insane. there are therefore no good options for video display of *any* kind.
2) there's no "industrial" or "embedded" style GPIO. no CAN bus, no PWM, no ADC, no DAC. there's also no audio. there's not even I2S and there's certainly no SPDIF. so to make up for that lack you'd have to add something like a Cortex M0, M3 or M4 embedded controller... and given that those usually come with built-in Power Management, NAND Flash and SDRAM, for the majority of purposes where you'd need to use an embedded controller with a Quark as a GPIO expander you'd be better off, cost-wise, with... just the embedded controller.
overall then there really aren't *any* markets that this chip could be useful for. if i'm wrong about that, and anyone can actually think of good uses for it, please do speak up.