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Comment by leaveyou | Hacker News Reader

>Brian Krzanich said the company's focus was on moving to the cloud, with data centers and the Internet of Things considered primary growth drivers

Cloud, servers.. I get it, Intel is well established there, but IoT ? Do they have a foothold in this area ? When I look on their page I don't see anything promising.. and when I think of IoT, I imagine some low power ARM SOCs like Raspbery Pis combined with Arduinos rather then anything Intel sells today.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/internet-of-things/pr...

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Wind River (Subsidiary of Intel) has a large foothold in the IoT market with their VxWorks and WR Linux OSs that play in the embedded/MCU market. Also see their free new open source OS, Rocket, which is being developed as the "Zephyr Project" in collaboration with the Linux Foundation.

With regards to OS for microcontrollers, ARM's mbed has far better low-power,security and ecosystem story.

And as far as Linux OS's - nobody will buy an OS that can't be ported to ARM and be done so reasonably, so i'm not sure Wind River helps Intel that much in selling chips.

Which are mostly running on ARM and PPC. Intel screwed up by dumping Xscale and their legacy embedded lineup. Windriver isn't going to save them.

WR is aggressively building out its Helix Cloud platform. Silicon is useless without the services/app dev/data management backend. If WR can migrate OS users up to Helix Cloud they can (somewhat) offset losses on Intel hardware and giving the newer OSs away for free.

Well, there's the new Quark, Curie, Edison offerings.

I don't see how that can save a company though.

They used to sell $200 processors like popcorn.

IoT = more clients = more servers, no?

Not really. A typical IOT client sends a few bytes every few minutes or hours. that's not much.

But the "internet of watching things", a world full of connected cameras is a different story. But it ain't a great slogan :)

> A typical IOT client sends a few bytes every few minutes or hours

That's the SigFox definition of IOT but not necessarily typical for all cases. There are several usecases out there which require slightly higher bandwidth and data rate, but not quite broadband.

One quick example is over the air firmware updates. Take MSP430. If we were to build a smart meter using a MSP430, our firmware probably be couple of kilobytes.

Likewise, the size of the data can vary upstream as well.

I agree that there are some other usecases, and they might impact wireless standards and chips at the client, for example.

But do you think those usecases have a big impact when coming to evaluate how big of cloud the IOT will require ? if so, please share a bit, so we could grasp the scale of things.

To some extent. But most IoT applications aren't about heavy back-end processing. They are about capturing things that were to small to bother with before. The amazon dash buttons would actually save them a few page loads when you order tide because they never had to load the gui. If your fridge is emailing your shopping list to some server once a day ( assume it makes 5 or 6 calls while you cook dinner or whatever ) so again you're not making a huge impact on a server. It may be some increase, but much of that is probably offset as we become better at over subscription of huge servers.

http://openconnectivity.org/ is the software side of the Intel IoT play

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