I think the page, despite its title, does a rather bad job of actually introducing the board.
Shouldn't it start, front and center, with a big sell-in as to why the Galileo is (I guess) more awesome than the Arduino? What you can do with it, that you couldn't do before? And, perhaps, just some basic specs? Now I had to look for the Specs page, and download a PDF, just to get the "bullet points" for this new platform.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a hobbyist I think I'll get one; even though financially it probably doesn't make sense, it'll be fun to play with what amounts to a "modern" 486! Would be extra fun to build a small kernel for it, which is probably what I'll end up using it for :)
Using a Core processor in 16-bit real mode makes me giggle these days, but I love fiddling with toy kernels! This seems well suited with an arch that I'm familiar with. One day I'll learn ARM properly I guess
I'm not clear about Intel's motivation for releasing this. Are they looking to capture a part of the hobbyist/education markets, or do they see this as being a product that will used by businesses (who I'm guessing are the majority of their customers) for serious embedded applications?
Note that I'm not saying at Arduinos can't be used for "serious" applications, only that my perception is that so far they haven't displaced existing microcontrollers in industrial/automotive/etc applications.
Arduino is a bunch of stuff around an Atmel microcontroller. For all intents and purposes, it is an existing microcontroller, except that the platform itself is outrageously expensive, far too expensive to be of any commercial use.
Galileo doesn't have hardware graphics acceleration, and native video outputs (may be solved by capes though). That would make Galileo not so suitable for media center or streaming applications, where BeagleBone and Pi excel... unless somebody manages to fit (externally powered?) PCIe graphics card and port its drivers to Galileo ;)
Even though it isn't about galileo, I wrote a blog post about the new Intel perceptual computing platform. In effect, they built a MS Kinect for $150, Windows only, and undeveloped software (only SDK).
Intel's new trend seems to be to piggyback on successful older ideas, and do badly at making their version. Its their choice to make sub-par equipment, but its also my choice to criticize them for these jokes.
And seriously... a x86 atmel clone? I can source 384's for $1.80 on digikey and use an arduino as a programmer. Sigh.
The BBB is a pretty rockin' little board. Really between the Arduino's ability to have applications extremely cost reduced and the full OS power of the BBB, the RPi has been squeezed out of my stable of solutions for small/embedded system applications.
I managed to get a galileo board at the Maker Faire Faire Rome if you are interested I can sell it to you, it has never been used, totally new I can send pictures. I live in France.
the net says end of november for general availability.
edit: from the FAQ: Where can I buy an Intel® Galileo development board?
The Intel® Galileo Board is scheduled to be available on or about November 29, 2013 from distributors such as, Mouser, Avnet, Arrow, Ingram, and at Maker Shed*.
Shouldn't it start, front and center, with a big sell-in as to why the Galileo is (I guess) more awesome than the Arduino? What you can do with it, that you couldn't do before? And, perhaps, just some basic specs? Now I had to look for the Specs page, and download a PDF, just to get the "bullet points" for this new platform.