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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.
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.
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
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
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?
Intel could very simply make GPU cards
Intel are the number one GPU company in the market.
Oh you meant high-performance GPUs? Man now don't have a clue about the industry do you? Patents aside, you can't just turn around and plop a high performance GPU at a good cost out overnight. Or even overyear. There are many 10s of thousands of R&D manhours that go into GPUs and lots of those hours end up in the patent office preventing other people from using the same idea.