Intel announces Edison: a 22nm dual-core PC the size of an SD card Cool! Umm... that's about all I can say about it. I'll leave the intelligent discussion to everyone else
Moved to Intel x86 hardware, since that's exactly what this is. It looks pretty cool. Presumably an ultra-low-power Atom unless Intel has built an even lower-power architecture. My only question is why they'd do it in an SD card formfactor. Wouldn't it make much more sense to design a proper connection for it rather than one which is almost exclusively used for storage? This is an especially big issue for wearable computers, where just having a fully-enclosing socket is a significant waste of space. SD only has nine pins, two of which will go for power. What can you do with the others? None of the normal digital display formats work, unless they just go for SPI. USB takes two more wires per port.
I'm reminded of William Gibson's vision of the internet with lots of devices communicating with each other without a router, wonder how small they can make the batteries etc? Will be useful for some stuff I'm sure, dunno why the devices mentioned in the article need more power than a little micro but they end up pretty big with WiFi or Bluetooth.
I think this is more of a proof of concept rather that a to market product. However I think it also opens new possibilities for this wave of wearable technology that everyone is jumping on.
Yah, in the article it mentions that it's for developers to toy with in order to see what they can do with it. Will be interesting to see what they come up with. Also, I thought it wasn't x86?
The Quark processor it's based on is reported as being x86-compatible (like here). Looks pretty darn interesting, I'm keen to see more specs.
The new Chumby (aimed at devs/hackers, own app store and whatnot), but in a much smaller and more flexible form factor, rather than looking like a football? Interesting indeed. Although the cynic in me suggests that this is just Intel slavering for a slice of good ol' raspberry pi and worried that they're missing the boat on the next gen of "hackable devices". The lead time would be about right... it's been a couple of years since rPi rumours first started floating around.
Let's hope so. If they're going after the Raspberry Pi market, that implies that Edison is going to be cheap - on the order of $50 or less (probably more like $30 if they actually want to steal market share from the RPi). On the other hand, to some extent Galileo is Intel's RPi competitor. It offers pretty decent performance (400MHz Pentium-class CPU, 256MB RAM, USB host, PCIe, etc) while also providing Arduino-compatible GPIO - one of the things that people tend to complain about on the RPi.
I dunno... the more I think about it, the more I realise that Intel probably couldn't give a rat's about market-share in the "hacker space". Not like it's a huge market. Although maybe it could be in the future, and grabbing a big chunk of it now would tie in with Intel's apparent global strategy of "Produce ALL the Silicon!!".
This is the shit. This is the type of thing needed to make a fully automated house. These sorts of computers will run "electronic" sliding doors like in Star Trek. EVERYTHING should be computerized.
