Intel has announced the first commercial product to use its low-power Quark CPU: the Arduino-compatible Galileo development board, due to launch later this year.

Part of Intel's growing focus on the ultra-low power embedded market, where it is a minnow compared to the likes of ARM, Texas Instruments and Atmel, the Quark is a system-on-chip design which Intel claims can act as both microcontroller and microprocessor in embedded systems. While drawing a tiny amount of power, the chip offers full x86 compatibility - roughly equivalent to an original Pentium in terms of instruction set - and is capable of running a fully-fledged operating system like Linux.

The first commercial use of Quark is to be Galileo, a development board designed for the maker community. The board is pin-compatible with Arduino shields designed for the Uno Revision 3 running at either 3.3V or 5V. It includes 14 digital input/output pins, six of which feature pulse width modulation (PWM) control, six analogue inputs through an external AD7298 analogue-to-digital converter chip, I²C and two-wire interface (TWI) support, serial peripheral interface (SPI) running at up to 25MHz, UART - in short, all the features of an Arduino Uno.

Where the Galileo differs from the Arduino Uno on which it is based is its processor: rather than a somewhat limited Atmel microcontroller, the Galileo is powered by a 32-bit single-core Quark chip running at 400MHz with 512KB of on-die SRAM. Thanks to this chip, the board also has some very tempting extras: a 10/100 Ethernet connector, a PCI Express 2.0 mini-card slot, a USB 2.0 host connector, a 10-pin JTAG header for debugging, 256MB of RAM and an 8MB legacy SPI flash area for program storage which can be expanded using a USB Mass Storage device or micro-SD card.

Impressively, the Galileo is truly Arduino compatible: the board can be programmed directly from the latest version of the Arduino IDE software just as any other Arduino board. A pre-loaded Linux operating system sits in the 8MB flash storage - similar to the new MIPS-based Arduino Yún.

UK pricing for the Intel Galileo has yet to be confirmed, with US pricing predicted to be under $60 - a cost that makes it extremely competitive compared to a traditional Arduino Uno with optional Ethernet shield. More details are available on the Arduino website.
Discuss this in the forums
YouTube logo
MSI MPG Velox 100R Chassis Review

October 14 2021 | 15:04

TOP STORIES

SUGGESTED FOR YOU