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Intel Releases SD-Card-Sized PC, Unveils Next 14nm Chip
szczys writes: Intel is upping their bid for a place at the efficient-yet-powerful device table. They've launched their Edison board, which features an x86 based SoC running at 100 MHz. The footprint measures 35.5mm x 25.0mm and offers a 70-pin connector to break out 40 pins for add-on hardware.
Also at the Intel Developer Forum today, the company demonstrated a PC running on Skylake, a new CPU microarchitecture based on the 14nm process used for Broadwell. Intel is pushing to break into both wearable devices and household devices, as it sees both as huge opportunities for growth.
Intel has the Product Brief up. Unless they specifically decided to hide the fact (which would seem unlikely), video appears to be absent.
Wireless connectivity looks pretty nice (wifi and bluetooth out of the box, though BTLE is mysteriously 'in Q4-14', which makes one wonder if perhaps the driver situation has a few grim little stories that we should know about...) and the inclusion of both 2x Atom cores at 500MHz and 1x Quark core at 100MHz is potentially interesting, depending on how easily and elegantly the Atom and Quark 'sides' of the device can talk to one another and either share control of, or at least transfer control of, the various I/O lines.
Not going to shove the rPi out of the way for video-pushing applications, and I suspect that PWM and bitbang-heavy applications may still be underimpressed by Intel compared to the classic microcontroller options; but it could certainly be a contender for a lot of the 'arduino-connected-to-the-network' applications which don't lean too hard on squeezing every last drop out of bare-metal-MCU work; but which could really use a bit more punch on the networking and storage/logging side.
TFS is simply incorrect; but may have been confused by Intel's "Galileo" board, which is based on Quark (at 400MHz). Curiously, 'Galileo' is much more Arduino-esque (a bit more raw punch, weaker hard-real-time bitbang); but also has a full PCIe lane(brought out on a miniPCIe connector) and 100Mb ethernet(optional PoE in Gen2); but no RF.
The much more PC-like, or at least BB Black/rPi-like Edison has a substantially punchier CPU; but no PCIe, wired ethernet, and includes wifi and BT.
I'm not sure if we are misjudging intel through the lens of existing products, or if Intel can't quite decide what niche to hit; but I find this mix a trifle confusing personally...
The teeny little one has the high powered CPU (relatively speaking); but not the high speed expansion bus or wired networking and PoE options. The relatively big one has high speed expansion (but severely limited GPIO, making compatibility with MCU projects that depend on bitbanging rather tepid); but the weak CPU and limited RAM.
I'm interested, and it's always worth keeping an eye on Intel; but I'm a bit confused about what they are aiming at here.