So what's up at Intel?

clem57

12 Apr 2015

I was wondering the other day, with all the talk here about ARM Cortex A series and M series microprocessors and microcontrollers, where has Intel been. Along comes this article http://liliputing.com/2015/04/what-intels-new-atom-x5-x7-cherry-trail-chips-can-do.html on Intel's newest series of Atom. I was surprised on several fronts. First the power consumption. These little SoC sip current at about 2W of power which is comparable to the Raspberry Pi 2. Also they have improved the GPU processing beyond the early days of Intel's graphic cores, even allowing multiple displays.

Click for larger image.

Currently you will find them in newest Microsoft Surface Pro models. Although I am not a fan of MS, I wonder how long it will be before some other vendor decides to use the chip on another board like ecosystem. What are your thoughts on this?

Clem

Top Comments

clem57 over 8 years ago in reply to Former Member

Well it appears your words are prophetic. Look at the new SBCs like Raspberry Pi 3, Dragon board(Qualcomm), Pine (Kick-starter China), and ODROID ...
Clem
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johnbeetem over 9 years ago

I'll start taking notice when there's a US$35 Atom board that competes directly with RasPi 2 and ODROID-C1.

JMO/YMMV
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Former Member over 9 years ago

While having the chance to play with the Gizmo2, I've also been putting some thought into recent developments around processing and small board computers. It seems to me that SoC designs are going to where the focus is being placed and quite rightly too. By integrating the vast majority of a computers chipset onto a single die, not only is there a monetary saving in the cost to produce a system but it also removes the vast majority of the pcb. The benefits gained also come with other disadvantages, for instance: if you take into consideration that all of those devices are going to generate a lot more heat in a smaller physical area then overheating becomes a much greater problem. Thinking along these lines, once everybody gets comfortable producing a standard range of SoC devices, pushing them forward will undoubtedly mean that more time will be spent developing more efficient cooling systems as well as designing the actual units to dissipate heat more evenly.

It appears that Intel have been dipping their toe into SoC devices for a while with Panasonic's latest consumer gear utilising Intel's SoC technology and manufacturing: http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2014/07/07/intels-custom-foundry-will-manufacture-future-panasonic-system-on-chips-using-intels-14nm-low-power-process

The whole SBC and SoC market is likely to become very interesting over the next few years with big name companies rolling out their own devices like NVIDIA's Tegra range, I expect there to be a frenzy of competition in this whole area in the near future.

Check out the Tegra K1 http://www.nvidia.com/object/tegra-k1-processor.html

Computing design is going to become a whole lot more interesting!

Lucie
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