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Intel's Joule is Its Most Powerful Dev Kit Yet (engadget.com)
Devindra Hardawar, writing for Engadget: We've seen plenty of unique dev kits from Intel, including the SD card-sized Edison, but not one as powerful as this. Intel announced Joule today, a tiny maker board that will allow developers to test RealSense-powered concepts and, hopefully, bring the to the market faster than before. The company says the tiny, low-powered Joule would be ideal for testing concepts in robotics, AR, VR, industrial IoT and a slew of other industries. And it also looks like it could be an interesting way for students to dabble in RealSense's depth-sensing technology in schools. There will be two Joule kits to choose from: the 550x, which includes a 1.5GHz quad-core Atom T5500 processor, 3GB of RAM and 8GB of storage; and the 570x, which packs in a 1.7Ghz quad-core Atom T5700 CPU (with burst speeds up to 2.4GHz), 4GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. Both models include "laptop-class" 802.11AC wireless, Intel graphics with 4K capture and display support, and a Linux-based OS.
$369. No.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I'm not sure Intel quite understands the concept.
have never bought a dev kit in the real world before, and believe me there's a world of difference between these things and a Raspberry Pi.
$369? Intel priced these to move.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
In this day and age, when 128gb worth of mmc is 30 bucks, 16gb of storage is a travesty.
Most powerful?
But only for one second!
>bring the to the market faster than before.
They are so flustered at Slashpot now they can't even type.
The few on the market seem to be at least double the price of a Pi 3.
A quad-core Atom x5-Z8350 costs $21. The Pi 3's CPU might cost $5. So an Intel board could cost $51, assuming there aren't other associated expenses.
At first sight, it looks like this is a horribly overpriced tiny-Linux gizmo - but what I think people here are missing is the important fact that it includes an integrated RealSense 3D camera...over 300 bucks for a $10 computer is a lot - but the RealSense 3D camera was selling for over $100 a few months ago - and that was a gigantic thing compared to this.
So, while I think they should be selling this for $50 to get more people interested in using it - I don't think it's surprising that they're asking so much as a "dev kit". The original RealSense dev kit (just the camera) was (IIRC) $200 - but included support from Intel engineers for serious developers.
www.sjbaker.org
I always love it when I can bring the to the market quicker than ever before!
I'd say the Edison was credit card sized. And (relatively) expensive-sized, like this new one.
Really? Because I think everyone except you really loves it when they can bring the to the market faster than ever before.
Okay, they cancel Broxton, but then they release this. So, smartphones and tablets are out, but this is a great prototyping board for industrial IoT and other smart devices? Look, if they don't have a story on cellular network capabilities, nobody is going to care, and if they do have a story there, then they didn't really leave those markets. Does the Surface Phone crawl along, zombie like, after all? At any rate, Intel has a lot of work to do in the embedded space. A lot.
It's a Core 2 Duo actually.
There once was a time when an article would clearly explain what it was talking about. What is a joule? A dev kit for what? What does it do? Why do i care? I have no idea. TFS is complete crap.
This is why Intel is becoming irrelevant in the embedded space.
While I am sure that this is not meant as a raspberry pi killer, the lack of a low cost Intel platform means that all cool interesting stuff is being done on ARM.
Not only that but the next generation of embedded engineers will grow up knowing about the ARM architecture, and Intel will become increasingly marginalized.
If I was Intel I would produce a $30 board, put on a version of vxworks linux (also Intel owned) and give them out to schools at the same time encourage the hacking community to extend the boards. But it won't happen, because Intel cannot see beyond PC's which are increasingly becoming irrelevant in the modern world
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
Back when Edison hit the market, I got seriously excited and started developing things that weren't possible without the CPU muscle and low power consumption that it offers. Then I ran into the sucking quagmire that is Intel's software support.
Broken drivers. Broken build environments. Undocumented pin muxing. Undocumented power management. Undocumented everything. Proprietary, unavailable tools needed to reconfigure things. They took a half-finished, 30% functional board support package, excreted it upon the world, and hoped that Open Source Magic meant that everyone else would fix their shit. Nearly three years later, almost nothing has been fixed and the product (whose hardware is still unmatched for power efficiency among hacker SBCs) is effectively dead.
I won't put any confidence at all in Joule until I see the kind of hardware documentation and software support that an embedded system needs to actually be, y'know, embedded into things.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!