

Intel and TBS Announce America’s Greatest Makers Reality Show, $1M Prize - dcschelt
http://makezine.com/2015/08/19/intel-americas-greatest-makers/

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jonlucc
This could be a new generation for the Junkyard Wars type of show, and I'm
excited at the prospect. On the other hand, poor implementation or chasing a
wide audience might lead to a lot more human drama than necessary and less
technical topic.

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makomk
Looks like Intel yet again trying to convince the world they're not being left
behind by the Internet of Things. For those who aren't aware, the Intel Quark
the show centers around is a die-shrunk and slightly modernised 486 that's
trying to compete with modern ARM Cortex-M designs with predictable results.
(Worse power consumption, worse IPC, pretty awful all round.) Hence PR
exercises like this one.

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minthd
You forgot the most important parts: they also have a dedicated pattern
recognition engine, and they claim everything is very low power.

Let's wait and see if it's true. I remember their Galileo chip was indeed low-
power.

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makomk
The Galileo was advertised as low-power, but the reality was rather uglier:
[https://learn.adafruit.com/embedded-linux-board-
comparison/p...](https://learn.adafruit.com/embedded-linux-board-
comparison/power-usage) (And remember, that's comparing it to the original RPi
with its already-ancient main CPU and inefficient linear voltage regulators.
What's more, take a look at the performance comparison on the page before.
Nasty.)

Also, the competing chips are fast enough and low-power enough that they
essentially _are_ dedicated pattern recognition engines with the right
firmware. If you look at for instance Apple's M8 motion processor, that's just
a Cortex-M3 chip, and not even a particularly power-efficient one by modern
standards. I wouldn't even be surprised to find that Intel's just embedding a
competing microcontroller core as their pattern recognition engine; it's how
everyone else does it.

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paulcole
That sandwich making machine's time to shine has arrived.

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zaaaaz
And thus I realized I was not the only person to dream up the sandwich-making
machine...

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paulcole
We have all dreamed of a sandwich-making machine. Only yCombinator could bring
it to life.

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mrtron
I had a sandwich making machine while growing up, it was amazing.

(my father was a terrible cook, but could make an amazing sandwich)

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tmaly
wow that chip is going to be fun to solder with

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makomk
Makes the QFN packages of all the competing chips look positively hobbyist-
friendly. (This seems to be aimed at the same market as stuff like the Nordic
Semi nRF52 series and the TI CC2650. Which still aren't trivial to build
boards for, but quite a few makers have managed it with the older nRF51822.)

I wonder if it's even possible to build a PCB for this without using expensive
microvias.

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tryp
I couldn't find much data on the Curie module, but it looks like the only pins
required are power and slow io, so I can't imagine it's a super dense bga or
anything. Even on the high end Intel socs with over 1k balls a good designer
can escape all the signals without microvias.

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doragcoder
Okay, seriously, who's with me to pitch the first Hackathon Reality show based
on MasterChef and The Voice that features 48-hours of drama, suspense,
beautiful graphics and working app at the end?

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untog
It's been tried. Hackathons are dull as hell to watch. At least with hardware
"makers" you'll see things getting constructed.

