FEZ Quark?

[mhectorgato]

Intel Announces “Quark” SoC Family: Tiny SoCs For Tiny Devices

Intel is tasking Quark with covering the markets that traditionally use embedded microprocessors and other types of low power, low performance controllers. This would cover everything from wearable computers to smart watches on the consumer side, and any number of uses in industrial products as we already see today.

At the same time Intel is calling Quark an open architecture product, which is not a term they typically attach to x86.

[njbuch]

This is exciting stuff. Better than the M7 mobile co-processer Apple just announced

[Duke_Nukem]

Sometimes I wonder if Intel went on vacation and forgot to come back as they pretty much owned the CPU market across the board and now they are playing catch-up in a number of key markets. I know its fun to chase down and kill competitors, but Intel might have been a little too generous on the head start they gave their competitors, but I look at v1 products as just an indication of interest and its the v2, v3 products that tell me if they are serious.

[mhectorgato]

@Duke Nukem

Sometimes I wonder if Intel went on vacation and forgot to come back as they pretty much owned the CPU market across the board and now they are playing catch-up in a number of key markets. I know its fun to chase down and kill competitors, but Intel might have been a little too generous on the head start they gave their competitors, but I look at v1 products as just an indication of interest and its the v2, v3 products that tell me if they are serious.

I think they under-estimated the mobile market a while ago. The Atom stagnated, while the Core was tick-ticking away. So now they are coming with guns blazing.

[godefroi]

@Duke Nukem

Sometimes I wonder if Intel went on vacation and forgot to come back as they pretty much owned the CPU market across the board and now they are playing catch-up in a number of key markets. I know its fun to chase down and kill competitors, but Intel might have been a little too generous on the head start they gave their competitors, but I look at v1 products as just an indication of interest and its the v2, v3 products that tell me if they are serious.

They never really owned this market (or the mobile market). They licensed ARM’s IP and manufactured chips for a while under the XScale brand, but they sold that off to Marvell. The microcontroller market specifically they haven’t been prominent in since the 80s, with the 8051.

So, yeah, they owned the CPU market, but the CPU market wasn’t what it was today. If anything, they have that same market (high-powered desktop, server, and laptop CPUs) tied up even tighter than they ever have (with AMD a distant second, now). The problem is, the “CPU market” got a whole lot bigger in the interim.