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Intel To Cut IoT Jobs (electronicsweekly.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel is laying off people in its IoT group following its recent cuts to three of its IoT products -- the Joule, Edison and Galileo boards. 97 jobs are to be lost in Santa Clara and up to 40 more in Leixlip, Ireland. IoT accounts for less than 5% of Intel's sales.
...the IoT bubble exploded before being fully inflated ?
Intel never had the right product focus for these IoT devices. Overall cost was too high for hobbyists, and the main product differentiation was basically "we're Intel instruction set compatible" in an age where others are offering JavaScript compatibility. I'm afraid as long as Intel makes their architecture out to be their main selling point they're going to be out of tune with these emerging markets. Same reason they missed the phone and tablet market, in my opinion.
Tractors should be outlawed. People don't need to be pulling plows, seed drills and combines with artificial horses. It is, however, a great way to become dependent on petroleum.
It would be a huge win for horse breeders.
Promoting hopelessly overpriced boards in an area where x86 has no benefit in addition to having insufficient documentation wasn't the gamechanger they expected! If only someone knew why. -_-
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I learned my lesson long ago with Intel back in the i960 days or maybe before that. With them it is all about the CPU chips. No matter what they say. The one exception are their Network Interface chips
Here is the pattern: They use their unlimited money+market position+PR machine to fund some kind of tech, pump up a bunch of customers, trade groups, get projects started with generous relationships ("partnerships"), make lots of press.
A year or two down the road it gets de-funded, spun-out, quietly quashed. The numbers weren't what they wanted so the inevitable corporate-level decision is to return to our "core competency" and that of course is selling CPU chips.
Anyone who was sucked into designing something with their switch chip product line knows what I am talking about. Remember SSI? If you didn't you dodged a bullet. Infiniband? Network Processors? FPGAs? Then Over 2+ decades (starting with the i186) every 3-4 years they would venture into the embedded controller market just to pull back out of it again. Not Intel Core? Not committed.
However their current product lineup for embedded is actually pretty damn good. Not only are their designs better thought out but market and ecosystem conditions are fortuitous for them. Most of all, it is now all about selling Intel i3/i5/i7-family CPUs. That alone will keep that line it alive.
Last week I met a startup that had developed a cool personal "AI-powered" robot that did offline voice recognition and motion tracking. When I asked about dev kits they said they had used Joule... the remainder of our chat would be best described by pregnant pauses.
Intel really needs to get it together, they are a CPU company and GPUs are tall the rage right now and you cannot buy a decent video card, out of stock and the companies cannot keep up with the demand. Intel could very simply make GPU cards (AMD does) and make a billion dollars over night and save the jobs of these hard working people. Just pisses me off they cut jobs instead of making what is needed and keeping the staff working.
No real surprise here. Said it before.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
IoT SoC requirements
for most applications (switches, dimmers, dumb controllers, sensors) the following should be plenty:
8 or 16bit instruction set (64bit is way overkill)
1MB RAM - or perhaps tens or hundreds of KB
BlueTooth LE
hardware support required (to not eat battery) for:
tamper-proof clock
AES128 encrypt/decrypt
ECDSA256 sign/verify
1KB secure nonvolatile memory (unreadable but usable-by-reference) for provisioning keys, signing keys
not required:
floating point
ideally, this should draw less than a milliwatt when in use, negligible on standby. whole part should be less than $1.
THIS IS NOT INTEL'S MARKET
extreme example (except lacks security) is http://cubeworks.us
But I need my internet-connected toilet.
Tractors != IoT DaaS (device-as-a-service).
I forgot about that. I stand corrected. If it isn't already true, I'm sure they will eventually switch to IoT black boxes for their DMCA/software locks..
Sadly, ARM is becoming a monoculture in many areas of computing, as x86(-64) is in desktop/laptop space. I'd like to see more architecture choices (MIPS and POWER) in some markets.
Unfortunately, a lot of the semiconductor companies out there have reduced: just like Freescale & NXP have been digested by Qualcomm. Hardly looks like there's much out there. If a company chooses MIPS or Power, they have to make a business case for it to embedded customers on why it should be preferred over ARM, that has all the momentum. And if they choose ARM, they run up against goliaths like Qualcomm, Apple & Samsung.
Maybe there could be some companies running it on RISC V, where one USP is that since it's a FOSH (Free Open-Source Hardware) architecture, there may be less to pay in terms of patents to ARM or MIPS or IBM. In fact, RISC V could be something that some fabs could decide to do themselves whenever they need to fill capacity: they do have to have designs-in, though
IoT != DaaS.
I have a fairly connected home but nothing is hosted outside of my house. All of the IoT devices and cheap Chinese cameras are on their own firewalled VLAN.
You can do IoT without giving control of your own devices.
So what was the product Intel was positioning for the IoT market? The 386SX? If they just took that design, added some level 1 cache and put it on their current most inexpensive process, they'd be optimal for it.
Why wouldn't a 386 be much of a selling point, when every embedded OS out there - not just Linux or BSD, but also things like FreeDOS, QNX, Minix, Minuet, et al exists for that platform. If one is looking for flexibility in number of hardware sources, one can limit themselves to Linux & BSD and go look there. If one is looking for flexibility in the choice of OS platforms, then it makes sense to go w/ 386. Only question - is Intel still the only game in town, or does Via or SiS still have their solutions?
StrongARM, actually XScale, was sold to Marvel some 10 years ago.
The 80386EX did enjoy some support, after its predecessor the 80376 fizzled out. Incidentally, has AMD discontinued its 386 as well? How about Via, which had acquired Cyrix ages ago? Some of the 386 CPUs of yesteryear would be fine on embedded systems if they were sold.
That is true, but DaaS will likely be the most common application. At some point (two decades?), most appliances will require net access to function at all because the real money is in user tracking. Why just sell a $500 refrigerator when you can sell a $500 refrigerator AND track its use and sell the data?
I hope I am wrong and this never happens.
The 386SX? If they just took that design, added some level 1 cache and put it on their current most inexpensive process, they'd be optimal for it.
That would be extremely over-complex.
x86 ISA isn't exactly a lean architecture and instruction set.
Modern ARM can do much better with a small transistor foot print.
But too bad, Intel discontinued their StrongARM serie.
Why wouldn't a 386 be much of a selling point, when every embedded OS out there - not just Linux or BSD, but also things like FreeDOS, QNX, Minix, Minuet, et al exists for that platform.
The main selling point of a x86 chip would be code compatibility.
But nobody sane in their mind is going to try to run Windows XP on a IoT device.
All the other OSes are also available on ARM.
The other point where x86 shines is raw performance on high range CPUs (simply because Intel and AMD [x86] are the only company spending R&D money on optimizing chips for that segment. Everybody else - Apple, Qualcom, etc. - are optimizing for the embed market)
but that's absolutely NOT what's needed on IoT devices.
If one is looking for flexibility in number of hardware sources, one can limit themselves to Linux & BSD and go look there. If one is looking for flexibility in the choice of OS platforms, then it makes sense to go w/ 386. Only question - is Intel still the only game in town, or does Via or SiS still have their solutions?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
So predictable that an AC comment on Slashdot predicted it a few weeks ago.
People don't need connected ....
The devices I currently have at my house connected to the Internet include the DVR, security system, lawn sprinkler control, vacuum robot. I haven't installed a Nest thermostat yet.
I took a pass on an connected refrigerator because yes it is possible to go too crazy with this stuff. But each of the other devices has turned out to be convenient at one time or another and well worth having for the modest cost involved.
The security thing is really not that hard for anyone with minimal understanding of the issues involved.
The bottom line is you will have useful IoT and you will have useless IoT. You will have good vendors and you will have crap vendors. Like any other market.
Fun facts: some of the earliest IoT devices were many years ago and not called that. There was a Christmas tree you could poll or set via an early SNMP demonstration (can't remember what year that was) and I think also a coffee pot. The only thing "new" about IoT is we can make the devices small enough and cheap enough to make small applications commercially viable.
Your tractor is probably an IoT device anyway
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
But at the process nodes that Intel is at today, couldn't Intel easily build an entire legacy 386SX based legacy computer on one of their Altera chips for less than the cost of an ARM board?
>x86 ISA isn't exactly a lean architecture and instruction set.
>Modern ARM can do much better with a small transistor foot print.
In which universe is the ARM instruction set "lean"?
Every instruction is 32 bits long, clogging one's instruction bandwidth.
In my universe where the *perfomance* that interests me is the power budget of the IoT device, which is rather closely related to how much the chip maker can cran in as little silicon as possible. the current generation of ARM chips simply provide more with less silicon (among chief reasons : the RISC instruction sets, and the constant instruction width that you've criticized makes the instruction pipeline much simpler) (whereas x86 chips tend to be a RISC-ish backend with a huge x86 interpreter on top of it) (in an over simplified way: ARM just gets rid of the complex instruction decoder, which spares silicon and ends up sparing a few watts which is critical for a IoT device - hence Intel not being king there - whereas nobody give a fuck for a couple of watts on a 200W monster - hence it not being a draw back on high-end desktops and servers).
On the other hand, memory is cheap, flash is cheap too and it doesn't eat that much into the power budget of IoT.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]