Yes. Cost is required. I've got some experience with Atmega based Arduino boards and making small and fun projects. The reason I ever got into all this was that I could pursue it like a hobby as it never weighed my pocket down.
Looking forward to this if it is affordable enough :D
It does seem like a bit overkill, while good for prototyping certainly not something you are going to embed in final projects, considering you can make a DIY arduino compatible for about 10$ and for most parts it cuts it. If too weak - there is still a range of more powerful ARM microcontrollers for under 10$ which only need a few passive components worth about 5$ to function.
Comment about it being based on Pentium ISA is interesting - at IDF they weren't talking to us at all about the architecture.
Pentium was what they had dusted off for Larrabee/Knights Corner/Xeon Phi. Would that imply Quark builds on that? Maybe they have just taken a Xeon Phi and snipping it into sixty pieces?
No didn't mean they were going run ray-traced / HPC compute on it! :-p
Just the thought that Larrabee was built around this weird resurrected/streamlined Pentium cores deployed en masse. Funny that the same (presumably?) Pentium ISA pops up again. Was wondering if they had taken some of the IP and repurposed it for the IoT/microcontroller market...
Well, because spoked wheels were better than solid wooden wheels, and iron covered wooden wheels were better than wooden wheels, and rubber covered wheels were better than iron covered wheels, and vulcanized rubber wheels were better than rubber wheels, and steel belted vulcanized rubber wheels were better than vulcanized rubber wheels.....need I go on?
"Maybe they have just taken a Xeon Phi and snipping it into sixty pieces?" Yeah funny, and add some i/O blocks to it and behold a quark sized Pentium!. Yikes only 256MB of RAM there ?!. Compared to ARM boards that featured 512MB or 1GB embedded ram already. This is only good for replacing all those dumb cash registers running DOS. Also, the lack of standard wifi is a Fail for hobbyist board!. Very disappointed that Intel with all their resources cannot yet out-Arm the Arm ISA. Why do do a better ISA for low powered better than ARM ?. Not X86 which is little work but think "micro/nano Itanium" designs ......
Arduino's typically only have a few KB of ram. and a few hundred KB of flash. This thing has TONS of storage compared to most arduino's, even the ARM Cortex M series based Duo or Arduino compatible boards. Significantly higher clockspeed than those too. It almost competes with the ARM Cortex A series embedded ;linux boards, and I bet you could get linux on there! I want one, bad!
This is an embedded processor. While you could run DOS on this, you are more likely to write directly for the processor. If you need more power and x86, atom is your guy. If your program is bigger than 256MB, you might want want a little bit more power.
I'm not sure why Intel needs to provide universal wifi for hobbyists when most of us use rf, zigbee or a $10 wifi router with ethernet switch, depending on our project.
IA64 is, a) a 64 bit architecture, b) different to x86 and x64 and c) slowly dying architecture. I get that it would be cool, but it wouldn't be burning the x86 flame.
You're talking nonsense. 256MB RAM for a system without video output is more than plenty and cannot even be properly used under DOS. Even more there only few ARM boards on the market that have PCIe and built-in Ethernet MAC (they usually key off USB 2.0 like the Raspberry Pi or SDIO) and under 60$ is a real killer price as well compared to somewhat competent ARM boards like a Pandaboard. Regarding the lack of WLAN: That's the last feature a "hobbyist" needs on such a device; configuring WLAN without a fully fledged OS and UI is a royal PITA.
Of course they based it on a single Phi core, or at least one of the P54C-based cores. Why would they reinvent the wheel?
For the dumb cash register, and many other such devices, reusing the fully debugged and field tested software is the key cost savings for the manufacturer.
Hello. There is a Gen 2 mini-PCIe slot. Use whatever WiFi you want with both Linux and Windows drivers already available.
There is already a ton of ready to go x86 software and a huge ecosystem of dev tools for x86. A new ISA would involve way too much lag time when they are already playing catch up. Doesn't make sense at this point.
This is Pentium ISA, not Pentium micro-architecture. This just tells one thing and one thing only: this is 32 bit x86 instruction set. You can bet that there is nothing similar in Quark and Pentium cores.
I very much doubt that. It is very unlikely they reinvented the wheel with a built-from-scratch core. It is certainly not just a simple die shrink, but is very likely based on the P54C core (that is still being made btw).
Pentium ISA means, among other things, no vector registers and no 64-bit. The no vector registers presumably means this is not based in any real way on the Larrabee world.
Why 32-bit? Seeing as ARM (Apple now, AMD 2014) is moving toward 64-bit, this seems confusing to me. Is the Arduino market that vital to Intel's business?
ARM is only starting to move to 64bit at the very top end; Atom is Intel's competitor there and BayTrail is 64bit there (although still lacking in drivers/windows support). This appears to be intended to compete against arm processors like the M3 which are for much lower end devices than smartphones; the 256mb of ram on the board alone should make it clear it's not intended to compete with A7, Cortex A-57, or other ARMv8 capable processors.
The design seems like it'll suck a lot more power than the ARM based boards I've looked at. 5V @ how many mA for a power supply, and DDR3? Am I wrong on that?
You can choose between 3.3V and 5V operation for your IO (what you hook up to this board). This is standard for Arduino compatible boards.
I'm guessing the CPU will run close to 0.8V (thought I have heard of Intel tech demo running at 0.6V at this speed). This CPU also has sleep states, but I would need to read the datasheet first before I could tell you how useful this is.
I know next to nothing about low speed DDR3, but given the CPU clocks at 400MHz, I would assume the ram will run at or below 400MHz and @ 1 - 1.2V.
Does the mini-PCIe slot supports m-sata? Does the board support DEVSLP? It may have appeal as a low power Debian server. I would spend $5 to turn the client usb into a second ethernet port and run firewall/router services, DNS/DHCP servers, a P2P daemon and a ssh server. The memory and CPU may be a lovely match for this workload. If average power consumption at the wall is under 3 watts, it sounds good to me. Not every server requires Atom class horsepower.
It would be fun if they'd make a sort of Raspery PI competitor out of this. All this thing needs is a video display, and it's essentially my gaming rig from the late '90s! A quick stop at GOG.com and I'm good.
From the comments here, there seem to be some confusion as to what Quark is targeting. Reading AnandTech's Quark article would suggest that Quark is targeted at the Cortex-M and R series, which are embedded microcontrollers with real-time performance. If you look at the Arduino Due that uses a Cortex-M3, you'll notice it has a bunch of IO pins and things, but far less other integrated stuff such as ethernet and PCI-E (!). The microcontroller is very lean, so the user can write code and attach interrupts with the confidence that they will be executed within a fixed upper-bound latency. Consequently, the code is also very lean, generally without an operating system.
If you look at the Cortex-A series of CPUs, you'll see lots of features comparable to Quark. The platform that's more comparable would be the raspberry Pi, which has decent amount of dram and all those integrated stuff and actually runs a full fledged OS.
So it looks to me that Quark is somewhere between the Cortex A and M series, which might be the reason people are confused as to what to compare it to in the ARM space. Ultimately I think to compete in the microcontroller space the Quark needs to be real-time, which in my limited understanding has some constraints as to what the processor can support.
We used 80x86 PCs running DOS back in the 80's for lab instruments. TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) routines are used. They load an area of reserved RAM with the interrupt handler code and set an interrupt vector. There is no scheduler. There is no user mode or kernel mode. The interrupt handler loaded into RAM by the TSR literally runs immediately (the very next instruction) when the interrupt occurs. It exits by literally jumping back to the program counter address at the time the interrupt occurred. It just does not get any more real-time than that. Of course, you are limited to running a single task, but most real-time microcontroller space stuff only needs a single task. So using Quark for real-time microcontroller stuff could is really simple. Just run DOS, loading your interrupt handlers with TSRs and launching your control app at boot.
The quark can fully support running as RealTime, in fact just about any CPU can, it really is up to the OS/software, not the CPU. For example, you can run RTLinux on a Quark SOC and get real-time performance.
The mPCIe slot is the most interesting aspect of this device since that can be adapted to a PCIe 1x slot. There are means of getting video cards to fit into a PCIe 1x slot for those truly crazy.
I'm not sure I quite get it either. I am an avid user of Arduino UNO, Arduino DUE and RasberryPi.
Several hobbyist from Australia, GreatBritain and Venezuela are working on implementing the native Ethernet interface on the Cortex-M3 of the DUE (2). Others here in the US and Tiajan have developed FULL graphical UI libraries and are integrating decent sized full color LCDs with touch capabilities. SD libraries give us DOS like storage capabilities. Then, there are the I/O interfaces....CAN, I2C/TWI, SPI, Serial, USB, etc... Limiting factor for us with DUE is Speed (86Mhz) and Memory (512KB). The ARM libraries for DUE still need work.
For most of my projects the ArduinoUNO (1) with it's 5V interfaces and 16Mhz CPU is sufficient.... I've even begun to use the Arduino Mini Pros...operating at 3.3v @ 8Mhz. The AVR libraries for UNO are very mature.
Then of course there is RasberryPI....I have it running with the Rasbian Linux distribution. It overclocks reliably to 1Ghz.... and the 512MB of ram is plenty. It's really neat to hook this thing up to the HDMI input of a large 1920X1080 LCD TV and use it like a PC. I have several shields for it as well...from Relays, General I/O and Scientific Instrumentation.
There is something here though.... Arduino recently released the YUN... which has a MIPS processor running at 400Mhz with 256MB of ram and runs a Linino Linux distribution. It is coupled with an AVR processor for full UNO 5v functionality compatability. The entire device shares the UNO R3 footprint.
In the Spring, Arduino will be releasing the TRE (3). This uses a Cortex A-8 processor at 1Ghz with 512MB of ram. It too will be coupled with a UNO AVR compatabile microcontroller for full UNO 5V compatiability. Interesting the Cortex A-8 will also drive several 3.3v I/O points.
So, Intel is just moving into a space that others like Arduino are occupying or plan to occupy.
WIth so many of us investing so much time into the Cortex-M3 architecture and the Arduino Develpment Environment..... looks like we will be getting left behind. Bummer.
I work for Mouser Electronics and we now have the Intel Galileo available for pre-order on our website. We’ll be getting the first shipments of stock in mid-November.
I work for Mouser Electronics and we now have the Intel Galileo available for pre-order on our website. We’ll be getting the first shipments of stock in mid-November.
Stop being such a crybaby people. This board has plenty of potential and you should not expect perfection out of a rev1 product. They have donated them to universities across the country which is a step in the right direction for adoption. I see lots of potential here and am buying one today.
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42 Comments
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ddriver - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
No word on cost?SeleniumGlow - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Yes. Cost is required. I've got some experience with Atmega based Arduino boards and making small and fun projects. The reason I ever got into all this was that I could pursue it like a hobby as it never weighed my pocket down.Looking forward to this if it is affordable enough :D
wsw1982 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
It said to be around $50ddriver - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
It does seem like a bit overkill, while good for prototyping certainly not something you are going to embed in final projects, considering you can make a DIY arduino compatible for about 10$ and for most parts it cuts it. If too weak - there is still a range of more powerful ARM microcontrollers for under 10$ which only need a few passive components worth about 5$ to function.wsw1982 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
As a reference, a ATML AVR Arduino board cost from 40$ to 60$ddriver - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Not really, there are a few boards below 25$.Jon Tseng - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Comment about it being based on Pentium ISA is interesting - at IDF they weren't talking to us at all about the architecture.Pentium was what they had dusted off for Larrabee/Knights Corner/Xeon Phi. Would that imply Quark builds on that? Maybe they have just taken a Xeon Phi and snipping it into sixty pieces?
ddriver - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
No, this core doesn't seem to have anything to do with the "Larrabee" design, and is targeted at fundamentally different applications.Jon Tseng - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
No didn't mean they were going run ray-traced / HPC compute on it! :-pJust the thought that Larrabee was built around this weird resurrected/streamlined Pentium cores deployed en masse. Funny that the same (presumably?) Pentium ISA pops up again. Was wondering if they had taken some of the IP and repurposed it for the IoT/microcontroller market...
Jaybus - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
The core is almost certainly at least based on P54C. Why reinvent the wheel?68Namvet - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Well, because spoked wheels were better than solid wooden wheels, and iron covered wooden wheels were better than wooden wheels, and rubber covered wheels were better than iron covered wheels, and vulcanized rubber wheels were better than rubber wheels, and steel belted vulcanized rubber wheels were better than vulcanized rubber wheels.....need I go on?fteoath64 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
"Maybe they have just taken a Xeon Phi and snipping it into sixty pieces?"Yeah funny, and add some i/O blocks to it and behold a quark sized Pentium!.
Yikes only 256MB of RAM there ?!. Compared to ARM boards that featured 512MB or 1GB embedded ram already. This is only good for replacing all those dumb cash registers running DOS. Also, the lack of standard wifi is a Fail for hobbyist board!.
Very disappointed that Intel with all their resources cannot yet out-Arm the Arm ISA. Why do do a better ISA for low powered better than ARM ?. Not X86 which is little work but think "micro/nano Itanium" designs ......
extide - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Arduino's typically only have a few KB of ram. and a few hundred KB of flash. This thing has TONS of storage compared to most arduino's, even the ARM Cortex M series based Duo or Arduino compatible boards. Significantly higher clockspeed than those too. It almost competes with the ARM Cortex A series embedded ;linux boards, and I bet you could get linux on there! I want one, bad!unfortunate - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
They already do come with an optimised linux os.Not This Guy - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
This is an embedded processor. While you could run DOS on this, you are more likely to write directly for the processor. If you need more power and x86, atom is your guy. If your program is bigger than 256MB, you might want want a little bit more power.I'm not sure why Intel needs to provide universal wifi for hobbyists when most of us use rf, zigbee or a $10 wifi router with ethernet switch, depending on our project.
IA64 is, a) a 64 bit architecture, b) different to x86 and x64 and c) slowly dying architecture. I get that it would be cool, but it wouldn't be burning the x86 flame.
Daniel Egger - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
You're talking nonsense. 256MB RAM for a system without video output is more than plenty and cannot even be properly used under DOS. Even more there only few ARM boards on the market that have PCIe and built-in Ethernet MAC (they usually key off USB 2.0 like the Raspberry Pi or SDIO) and under 60$ is a real killer price as well compared to somewhat competent ARM boards like a Pandaboard. Regarding the lack of WLAN: That's the last feature a "hobbyist" needs on such a device; configuring WLAN without a fully fledged OS and UI is a royal PITA.Jaybus - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Of course they based it on a single Phi core, or at least one of the P54C-based cores. Why would they reinvent the wheel?For the dumb cash register, and many other such devices, reusing the fully debugged and field tested software is the key cost savings for the manufacturer.
Hello. There is a Gen 2 mini-PCIe slot. Use whatever WiFi you want with both Linux and Windows drivers already available.
There is already a ton of ready to go x86 software and a huge ecosystem of dev tools for x86. A new ISA would involve way too much lag time when they are already playing catch up. Doesn't make sense at this point.
xdrol - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
This is Pentium ISA, not Pentium micro-architecture. This just tells one thing and one thing only: this is 32 bit x86 instruction set. You can bet that there is nothing similar in Quark and Pentium cores.Jaybus - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I very much doubt that. It is very unlikely they reinvented the wheel with a built-from-scratch core. It is certainly not just a simple die shrink, but is very likely based on the P54C core (that is still being made btw).DanNeely - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Someone over on Arstechnica found a block diagram for it in Intel's documentation. It's almost identical with that of a 486's.https://communities.intel.com/servlet/JiveServlet/...
http://intel-vintage-developer.eu5.org/DESIGN/INTA...
Kevin G - Sunday, October 6, 2013 - link
Odd, the block diagram for Quark doesn't include a floating point unit when that manual clearly indicates the presence of one.Not too surprising, no mention of SSE2.
extide - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link
Yes, it does, maybe you got the two images mixed up?xla209 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
The Quark announcement talks about compatibility with the Pentium ISA, not about the micro-architecture that implements this ISA.name99 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
The point is Pentium *ISA* not Pentium µArch.Pentium ISA means, among other things, no vector registers and no 64-bit. The no vector registers presumably means this is not based in any real way on the Larrabee world.
nathanddrews - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Why 32-bit? Seeing as ARM (Apple now, AMD 2014) is moving toward 64-bit, this seems confusing to me. Is the Arduino market that vital to Intel's business?DanNeely - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
ARM is only starting to move to 64bit at the very top end; Atom is Intel's competitor there and BayTrail is 64bit there (although still lacking in drivers/windows support). This appears to be intended to compete against arm processors like the M3 which are for much lower end devices than smartphones; the 256mb of ram on the board alone should make it clear it's not intended to compete with A7, Cortex A-57, or other ARMv8 capable processors.Jon Tseng - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Not the same category - this will compete more with microcontrollers than full fledged 64-bit SoCs, I suspect.ddriver - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Microcontrollers won't move to 64 bit simply because there is no need to for the time being. You give in to PR too much.fri2219 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
The design seems like it'll suck a lot more power than the ARM based boards I've looked at. 5V @ how many mA for a power supply, and DDR3? Am I wrong on that?Not This Guy - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
You can choose between 3.3V and 5V operation for your IO (what you hook up to this board). This is standard for Arduino compatible boards.I'm guessing the CPU will run close to 0.8V (thought I have heard of Intel tech demo running at 0.6V at this speed). This CPU also has sleep states, but I would need to read the datasheet first before I could tell you how useful this is.
I know next to nothing about low speed DDR3, but given the CPU clocks at 400MHz, I would assume the ram will run at or below 400MHz and @ 1 - 1.2V.
Honestly, a data sheet is your friend.
Not This Guy - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Whole board operates at 3.3V with a maximum draw of 800mA (@ 3.3V or 5V).dealcorn - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Does the mini-PCIe slot supports m-sata? Does the board support DEVSLP? It may have appeal as a low power Debian server. I would spend $5 to turn the client usb into a second ethernet port and run firewall/router services, DNS/DHCP servers, a P2P daemon and a ssh server. The memory and CPU may be a lovely match for this workload. If average power consumption at the wall is under 3 watts, it sounds good to me. Not every server requires Atom class horsepower.extide - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link
No, it does not support SATA at all.Mr Perfect - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
It would be fun if they'd make a sort of Raspery PI competitor out of this. All this thing needs is a video display, and it's essentially my gaming rig from the late '90s! A quick stop at GOG.com and I'm good.hammer256 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
From the comments here, there seem to be some confusion as to what Quark is targeting. Reading AnandTech's Quark article would suggest that Quark is targeted at the Cortex-M and R series, which are embedded microcontrollers with real-time performance. If you look at the Arduino Due that uses a Cortex-M3, you'll notice it has a bunch of IO pins and things, but far less other integrated stuff such as ethernet and PCI-E (!). The microcontroller is very lean, so the user can write code and attach interrupts with the confidence that they will be executed within a fixed upper-bound latency. Consequently, the code is also very lean, generally without an operating system.If you look at the Cortex-A series of CPUs, you'll see lots of features comparable to Quark. The platform that's more comparable would be the raspberry Pi, which has decent amount of dram and all those integrated stuff and actually runs a full fledged OS.
So it looks to me that Quark is somewhere between the Cortex A and M series, which might be the reason people are confused as to what to compare it to in the ARM space. Ultimately I think to compete in the microcontroller space the Quark needs to be real-time, which in my limited understanding has some constraints as to what the processor can support.
Jaybus - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
We used 80x86 PCs running DOS back in the 80's for lab instruments. TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) routines are used. They load an area of reserved RAM with the interrupt handler code and set an interrupt vector. There is no scheduler. There is no user mode or kernel mode. The interrupt handler loaded into RAM by the TSR literally runs immediately (the very next instruction) when the interrupt occurs. It exits by literally jumping back to the program counter address at the time the interrupt occurred. It just does not get any more real-time than that. Of course, you are limited to running a single task, but most real-time microcontroller space stuff only needs a single task. So using Quark for real-time microcontroller stuff could is really simple. Just run DOS, loading your interrupt handlers with TSRs and launching your control app at boot.extide - Monday, January 13, 2014 - link
The quark can fully support running as RealTime, in fact just about any CPU can, it really is up to the OS/software, not the CPU. For example, you can run RTLinux on a Quark SOC and get real-time performance.Kevin G - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
The mPCIe slot is the most interesting aspect of this device since that can be adapted to a PCIe 1x slot. There are means of getting video cards to fit into a PCIe 1x slot for those truly crazy.HardwareDufus - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I'm not sure I quite get it either.I am an avid user of Arduino UNO, Arduino DUE and RasberryPi.
Several hobbyist from Australia, GreatBritain and Venezuela are working on implementing the native Ethernet interface on the Cortex-M3 of the DUE (2). Others here in the US and Tiajan have developed FULL graphical UI libraries and are integrating decent sized full color LCDs with touch capabilities. SD libraries give us DOS like storage capabilities. Then, there are the I/O interfaces....CAN, I2C/TWI, SPI, Serial, USB, etc... Limiting factor for us with DUE is Speed (86Mhz) and Memory (512KB). The ARM libraries for DUE still need work.
For most of my projects the ArduinoUNO (1) with it's 5V interfaces and 16Mhz CPU is sufficient.... I've even begun to use the Arduino Mini Pros...operating at 3.3v @ 8Mhz. The AVR libraries for UNO are very mature.
Then of course there is RasberryPI....I have it running with the Rasbian Linux distribution. It overclocks reliably to 1Ghz.... and the 512MB of ram is plenty. It's really neat to hook this thing up to the HDMI input of a large 1920X1080 LCD TV and use it like a PC. I have several shields for it as well...from Relays, General I/O and Scientific Instrumentation.
There is something here though.... Arduino recently released the YUN... which has a MIPS processor running at 400Mhz with 256MB of ram and runs a Linino Linux distribution. It is coupled with an AVR processor for full UNO 5v functionality compatability. The entire device shares the UNO R3 footprint.
In the Spring, Arduino will be releasing the TRE (3). This uses a Cortex A-8 processor at 1Ghz with 512MB of ram. It too will be coupled with a UNO AVR compatabile microcontroller for full UNO 5V compatiability. Interesting the Cortex A-8 will also drive several 3.3v I/O points.
So, Intel is just moving into a space that others like Arduino are occupying or plan to occupy.
WIth so many of us investing so much time into the Cortex-M3 architecture and the Arduino Develpment Environment..... looks like we will be getting left behind. Bummer.
Phillip.Muniz - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
I work for Mouser Electronics and we now have the Intel Galileo available for pre-order on our website. We’ll be getting the first shipments of stock in mid-November.Link: http://www.mouser.com/new/Intel/intel-galileo-deve...
Phillip.Muniz - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
I work for Mouser Electronics and we now have the Intel Galileo available for pre-order on our website. We’ll be getting the first shipments of stock in mid-November.Link: http://www.mouser.com/new/Intel/intel-galileo-deve...
rollietikes - Tuesday, January 7, 2014 - link
Stop being such a crybaby people. This board has plenty of potential and you should not expect perfection out of a rev1 product. They have donated them to universities across the country which is a step in the right direction for adoption. I see lots of potential here and am buying one today.