Intel Quietly Discontinues Galileo, Joule, and Edison Development Boards (intel.com)

Intel is discontinuing its Galileo, Joule, and Edison lineups of development boards. The chip-maker quietly made the announcement last week. From company's announcement: Intel Corporation will discontinue manufacturing and selling all skus of the Intel Galileo development board. Shipment of all Intel Galileo product skus ordered before the last order date will continue to be available from Intel until December 16, 2017. [...] Intel will discontinue manufacturing and selling all skus of the Intel Joule Compute Modules and Developer Kits (known as Intel 500 Series compute modules in People's Republic of China). Shipment of all Intel Joule products skus ordered before the last order date will continue to be available from Intel until December 16, 2017. Last time orders (LTO) for any Intel Joule products must be placed with Intel by September 16, 2017. [...] Intel will discontinue manufacturing and selling all skus of the Intel Edison compute modules and developer kits. Shipment of all Intel Edison product skus ordered before the last order date will continue to be available from Intel until December 16, 2017. Last time orders (LTO) for any Intel Edison products must be placed with Intel by September 16, 2017. All orders placed with Intel for Intel Edison products are non-cancelable and non-returnable after September 16, 2017. The company hasn't shared any explanation for why it is discontinuing the aforementioned development boards. Intel launched the Galileo, an Arduino-compatible mini computer in 2013, the Edison in 2014, and the Joule last year. The company touted the Joule as its "most powerful dev kit." You can find the announcement posts here.

Comments

The end of the IoT road at Intel?

[bettodavis]

Good to remember that not long ago, Intel PR touted the IoT as the Next Big Thing and the company followed suit, with entire groups and people dedicated to having these products out the fab.

These development platforms (the vehicle for having their IoT processors into product makers' hands) being now discontinued most likely means the sales were disappointing and that these groups probably are no more and there won't be any follow up.

Which is not that surprising, giving Intel is used to earn a living from high margin products, not cheap stuff that needs to sell millions to make a margin.

Seems like this market, like Mobile before it, will belong to ARM.

Re:The end of the IoT road at Intel?

[timholman]

These development platforms (the vehicle for having their IoT processors into product makers' hands) being now discontinued most likely means the sales were disappointing and that these groups probably are no more and there won't be any follow up.

I don't think there was ever any serious commitment to the Galileo platform at Intel.

I was contacted by Intel in Dec. 2014 and asked if I wanted some free Galileo boards + Grove sensor kits to evaluate for academic use. It took them six months to ship the boards to me. Three times I emailed them, and each time a different person responded, because the previous contact had transferred to another group. After many apologies, I finally got the boards in June, but Intel had missed the window of opportunity for us to incorporate them into the 2015-16 labs, nor was there anything compelling enough in their specs to make any faculty want to try them out in place of Arduinos or BeagleBoards.

Last August, I gave one of the Intel kits to my teaching assistant to evaluate for use in our electronics lab. His report to me was that the Galileo boards were unsuitable, as their slow I/O made them unusable for the D/A conversion experiments that we needed them for. My TA then checked and found out that Intel had dropped their academic program entirely, so he built a board using a standard Atmel processor instead.

Given the huge amount of churn in Intel personnel working on Galileo, it was painfully obvious that their academic IoT push was doomed from the get-go. Intel still wants to sell $400 processors, not $2 IoT chips, and that is clearly where the internal prestige and employee rewards are being directly within the company.

Posting AC Obviously.

[Anonymous Coward]

I may or may not work for the vendor of these products.
I may or may not have had a hand in designing the chips.
I purchased a Galileo to mess with. After all, I know the chips quite well.

It was utterly unusable. I couldn't even light the LED. The documentation was a walkthrough of how to light the LED, but it didn't work. Involved in this was a whole software layer to make the native hardware interfaces look like some other board at the API level, which was obviously daft if you are trying to get people to know and understand the chip, so they choose to design it into products. I failed to crack through this layer of obfuscation before I gave up and did something more productive.