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Comment by ollymorgs | Hacker News Reader

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ollymorgs

I don't understand the selling point here, maybe someone can explain to me why:

1) I'll buy a board that's more expensive than all of it's competitors.

2) has a website that's impossible to understand any detail, it's all sales chat.

3) Has a tiny processor and even less RAM.

4) Very underwhelming specs all round, i'm also not that bothered about x86 (should I be?)

As far as I can tell, Intel has turned up late to the party with a cheap bottle of wine. I don't understand the unique selling point here at all, maybe someone can elaborate?

However, if intel's chip was super power efficient, and the board had a built-in li-ion battery that could power the whole thing for a month between recharges, now that would be interesting.

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1) It's "Intel"! 2) School boards buy into brand names "Kids should lean on Intel boards because they will be using Intel machines when they join the workforce" 3) the ad kinda reads like "Intel is finally legitimizing the Arduino and maker movement."

Administrators and PHBs (who BTW may hold Intel stock) are influenced by such things.

Bingo. In other words, HN readers, serious electronics hobbyists, anyone with even a little hardware savvy: these are not the target market. Intel is betting that they can steal/grow some significant piece of this market share based on their brand alone, and they are probably right.

> I don't understand the unique selling point here at all, maybe someone can elaborate?

Mini PCI Express slot?

That's why I'm picking one of these up. If for nothing more than hooking an FPGA up to it.

"As far as I can tell, Intel has turned up late to the party with a cheap bottle of wine." That is great!

My take on Quark is that it is Intels synthesizable offering. It is available as an IP core that you will include in your own SoC designs. This board could serve as a prototyping board for your SW team while you're busy finishing your own ASIC + boards.

Yes, thanks for bringing that up! Absolutely right, Quark is an entirely new direction for Intel:

http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1217623‎

Because buying XScale back from Marvell would look stupid?

Even if you did have x86-specific code chances are it wouldn't run on this anyway - it's basically a 486 and even a lot of Linux distros won't boot on hardware that ancient anymore.

Also, it's quite power hungry.

It's not a plain 486. The SemiAccurate article[1] offers some more details:

How did Intel achieve a P5 ISA on a 486? Easy they added the handful of instructions to the old core while they ripped and replaced just about everything else. What did they add? Obviously the few new instructions on the P5 but not in the Pentium MMX generation. On top of that PAE and large page support was added along with local APIC style interrupt support. - -

The Quark designers did start out with a 486 design and promptly threw most of it out. Most of it is a new core but some bits were actually carried over. Why start with a 486 rather than a Pentium if you throw most of it out before adding in all the new ISA bits but not the architectural advances that the P5 line brought to the table? Easy, power. The 486 uses less while providing the performance Intel had targeted. On top of this more traditional C-State support that is much better than the 486 could dream of but nowhere near a modern CPU was added to the Quark core.

They also threw out the 486's front-side bus and replaced it with a modern SOC equivalent with PCI Express and ARM's "AMBA Fabric".

With this many changes, it sounds like a reasonably modern x86 machine (except for a total lack of MMX/SSE vector instructions) that should be able to run a Linux distro that targets older hardware.

[1] http://semiaccurate.com/2013/10/28/intel-talks-little-quark/

Just plain P5 (without MMX instructions) is not a reasonbly modern machine. 486 came out in 1989 and Pentium in 1993 so you are still looking at a 20 year old instruction set. I don't think there are many modern Linux distros that are targeted to P5 anymore.

Still, for $70 I might pick one up just to relive my youth and I am sure there will be some things you will be able to run.

And on top of all that it only has I/O ports equivalent to an Uno. The auto 3.3/5v stepping on the pins is nice, but after working on a Due it feels... constrained.

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