Slashdot Mirror
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.
Who is going to buy this thing?
People who need a higher specced board in a compact, low power configuration. Looks like this board is sold as a solution for applications like robotics, machine vision, and VR, which often requires a bit more processing power than a Raspberry Pi can offer. And it's $369 for the dev kit, the real question is what the price of the board alone will cost (especially in bulk).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Their promotional literature says the following:
"Because the Intel Joule platform is based on an Intel® Atom SoC, transitioning a product design to high-volume production can be done with modest engineering expense, providing a mature platform for companies who require the option to scale down the road."
That suggests that the asking price, even in volume, is going to be at least modestly higher than the cost of stuffing the same parts onto your board; unless compactness is the only reason a customer would care about cutting the module and connector out of the design; but they probably care more about moving CPUs than about charging a markup on that specific packaging option, so I'd assume that they would offer the same deal for the SoC and wifi module whether purchased for your own board or integrated onto their board; with the cost of the rest of the assembly not being given away; but not being something it would make sense to mark up too much.
ARK doesn't list either of those Atom parts, though, so I don't know what the SoC itself would be expected to cost.
The builtin wifi with piggytail antennae is a nice touch, but it is still a step backward from the minnowboard, imo.
Minnowboard has much less processing power and much less ram, but sports an actual sata interface.
Intel seems fixated on having the sdcard be the one and only storage device on these dev boards. Personally, i feel putting a real ssd on here, or a spspiny disk for swap/temp file userver makes the offering far more robust.
I see it has what looks like a mini pie riser zif connector over on the side there, but that means buying in even deeper into their proprietary hardware stream. I would rather have seen an M.2 socket with lock down screw on the back. That at least is industry standard hardware.
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!
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.