Intel Releases SD-Card-Sized PC, Unveils Next 14nm Chip

szczys writes: Intel is upping their bid for a place at the efficient-yet-powerful device table. They've launched their Edison board, which features an x86 based SoC running at 100 MHz. The footprint measures 35.5mm x 25.0mm and offers a 70-pin connector to break out 40 pins for add-on hardware. Also at the Intel Developer Forum today, the company demonstrated a PC running on Skylake, a new CPU microarchitecture based on the 14nm process used for Broadwell. Intel is pushing to break into both wearable devices and household devices, as it sees both as huge opportunities for growth.

Dangerous Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a choking hazard

Re:

[Bengie]

Needs more salsa.

Re:Pricing?

[ArcadeMan]

The price I saw, without shields, is 49$USD. The thing I can't find is if this thing has any video and audio output capabilities.

Would this be better than a RaspberryPI for small-scale arcade cabinets?

Re:Pricing?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Intel has the Product Brief [intel.com] up. Unless they specifically decided to hide the fact (which would seem unlikely), video appears to be absent.

Wireless connectivity looks pretty nice (wifi and bluetooth out of the box, though BTLE is mysteriously 'in Q4-14', which makes one wonder if perhaps the driver situation has a few grim little stories that we should know about...) and the inclusion of both 2x Atom cores at 500MHz and 1x Quark core at 100MHz is potentially interesting, depending on how easily and elegantly the Atom and Quark 'sides' of the device can talk to one another and either share control of, or at least transfer control of, the various I/O lines.

Not going to shove the rPi out of the way for video-pushing applications, and I suspect that PWM and bitbang-heavy applications may still be underimpressed by Intel compared to the classic microcontroller options; but it could certainly be a contender for a lot of the 'arduino-connected-to-the-network' applications which don't lean too hard on squeezing every last drop out of bare-metal-MCU work; but which could really use a bit more punch on the networking and storage/logging side.

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[FrankDrebin]

Doubtful there's a driver problem with BTLE since there should be no new drivers required if the device is BT conformant (since the BT spec defines the HCI and that is well-supported by all major OS'es). More likely it's BTLE firmware for the chip that's under development.

Re:Pricing?

[petes_PoV]

Would this be better than a RaspberryPI for small-scale arcade cabinets?

There are already dozens of boards available that are better than the RPi for this sort of use. Many at less than the $49 this thing is up for grabs at.

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[ArcadeMan]

Better as far as the hardware and specifications goes yes, but what about support? Which one is the most popular with the game emulation communities?

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[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm definitely open to suggestions if you have any cool ones to point me to; but I've had some fairly unpleasant experiences with a lot of the theoretically-capable-and-crazy-cheap 'android stick' type sticks and boards. The rPi is indeed quite feeble; but what I/O it has is actually mostly broken out, and (while not exactly FSF-level 'open') is crazy open by the standards of something broadcom based, and enjoys a very strong community of people who can answer questions about any obscure points.

The beagl

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[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Sorry, my phrasing was ambiguous: the rPi I/O is 'broken out' in the sense of 'breakout board', it's substantially accessible on reasonably friendly headers that you can connect to without tiny elven soldering fingers or oddball connectors; unlike the (otherwise cheap and quite tempting) 'buy an android mini-stick-thing/used phone with 3rd party firmware support' option, which gets you power, sometimes a screen, and a few peripherals for crazy cheap; but where you'll be lucky to find a handful of undocument

Re:Pricing?

[Eric Smith]

$49 only gets you the Edison module, which is useless by itself. You also need a base board of some kind. The Edison module with the Arduino-compatible base board shown in the photos will set you back $99. Still a pretty good price. 3x more expensive than a Raspberry Pi, but it is a lot more capable.

I'd get more excited about a 64-bit ARM embedded board, but those aren't available yet, other than a $6000 development board from ARM.

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[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

$6,000? AMD's 64-bit-ARM Opteron A1100 reference board [anandtech.com] is half as much and (while obviously not very 'embedded') is a rather bigger piece of gear...

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[Eric Smith]

Yes, but good luck actually buying the A1100 reference board today. It's easy to offer a lower price on something you're not actually selling.

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[Agripa]

That was one of the first things I checked. I has neither video nor audio interfaces and apparently no peripheral interface except for USB and it is not clear how that is hooked up. In theory Ethernet could be added via USB but that is already my reason for not using the Pi.

It is not a replacement for the Pi or Beagle Bone.

Re:Pricing?

[ArcadeMan]

Also, the summary says "They've launched their Edison board, which features an x86 based SoC running at 100 MHz." but from what I've read, the CPU is a dual-core Atom running at 500MHz, it's the uC which runs at 100MHz.

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[ArcadeMan]

AFAIK, Intel Atom is and always was an x86 CPU.

I think you meant "it's both an Atom CPU and an MCU".

Re: Pricing?

[Narishma]

No, some Atoms are x86 only, some are x86_64.

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[jones_supa]

True, although only N270 and N280 are x86-32.

Re:Pricing?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

TFS is simply incorrect; but may have been confused by Intel's "Galileo" [intel.com] board, which is based on Quark (at 400MHz). Curiously, 'Galileo' is much more Arduino-esque (a bit more raw punch, weaker hard-real-time bitbang); but also has a full PCIe lane(brought out on a miniPCIe connector) and 100Mb ethernet(optional PoE in Gen2); but no RF.

The much more PC-like, or at least BB Black/rPi-like Edison has a substantially punchier CPU; but no PCIe, wired ethernet, and includes wifi and BT.

I'm not sure if we are misjudging intel through the lens of existing products, or if Intel can't quite decide what niche to hit; but I find this mix a trifle confusing personally...

The teeny little one has the high powered CPU (relatively speaking); but not the high speed expansion bus or wired networking and PoE options. The relatively big one has high speed expansion (but severely limited GPIO, making compatibility with MCU projects that depend on bitbanging rather tepid); but the weak CPU and limited RAM.

I'm interested, and it's always worth keeping an eye on Intel; but I'm a bit confused about what they are aiming at here.

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[GNious]

This seems designed as a demo-kit, for inclusion in IoT stuff, not for use at home in funny projects.

Arduino Compatible

[necro81]

The Dev Board that Edison plugs into appears to have Arduino R3 headers on there, presumably for plugging in Arduino-compatible shields. That's interesting, and makes a fair bit of sense: there are thousands of Arduino-compatible shields out there, and adding some serious computational power in there plus wire(d)(less) networking opens up a lot of possibilities.

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[QuasiSteve]

Correct - though that's only one option. You can also plug it into other boards (termed 'bricks', so Arduino has Shields, BeagleBone as Capes, and Edison has Bricks). SparkFun - next to Adafruit probably the best-known company for this sort of thing - has got a bunch of bricks plus the Edison available for pre-order starting today:
https://www.sparkfun.com/news/... [sparkfun.com]
https://www.sparkfun.com/categ... [sparkfun.com]

Among those is the standard Arduino form factor breakout out of Intel itself, but also a brick for an Arduino P

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[Areyoukiddingme]

You can also plug it into other boards (termed 'bricks',

You included links to SparkFun but still called them bricks? They're called blocks, not bricks.

There was a time when SGI held a trademark on calling computer expansion parts 'bricks'. Not sure if that trademark has lapsed or not. If Intel was calling them bricks and is now calling them blocks, one can surmise the trademark is still extant and it took a while for the lawyers to notice.

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[QuasiSteve]

Haha - you're absolutely right! Not sure why I had 'bricks' on the mind :(

These things used to be big as houses

[Anonymous Coward]

Boy have we come a long way.

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[LoRdTAW]

It's smaller than the 40 pin DIP package of the original 8086. As someone who first used an Apple II clone (Franklin Ace 1200) and then an 8086, I can still appreciate how far we have come.

Distractions

[suso]

Wow look at that cool new small device released by Ap.... Oh wait, nevermind.

An army!

[blueshift_1]

It's amazing how cheap and effecient microcontrollers have become... who needs a beefy computer when you can have an army of controllers for less!

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[TeknoHog]

It's amazing how cheap and effecient microcontrollers have become... who needs a beefy computer when you can have a Beowulf cluster of controllers for less!

FTFY.

x86?

[TeknoHog]

As this wasn't clear from skimming the articles, should I assume this is the old 32-bit x86 or x86-64? Because the latter has been around for 11 years, which is a geological time in computing, and we should really move on. Of course for something really embedded you'd want an ARM or a microcontroller, so there would be little point in keeping the x86 32-bit.

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[Eric Smith]

The 100 MHz Quark MCU is 32-bit. The dual-core Atom CPU is very likely 64-bit. There were some early Atom chips that had 64-bit disabled, but none of the recent ones have.

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[karnal]

I just watched the sparkfun video of their release of the device; it's 32 bit.

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[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It isn't 100% clear: All 'Silvermont' SKUs [wikipedia.org] appear to be 64 bit capable, and this board has a Silvermont-based Atom on it(two of them actually); but Intel's Edison Native Applications Guide [intel.com] definitely appears to be walking you through setting up a build environment for 32 bit x86.

Whether that means that Intel actually lasered support for 64 bit execution off when they were designing this chip(which isn't like most of the other Silvermont devices, which have a GPU and more PC-style I/O, so clearly some cut

wrong speed, szczys

[X0563511]

The microcontroller runs at that speed. The x86 CPU is 500mhz dual-core.

14nm? Where I come from, that's tiny.

[Wootery]

I never cease to be amazed by the progress made in shrinking transistors. I wonder [extremetech.com] how long the trend will continue.