We're expecting smartwatches, smart goggles and fitness trackers

Jan 6, 2014 08:35 GMT  ·  By

Google may be pioneering the augmented reality headset market with the Google Glass, and Samsung/Sony/LG/etc. might have become the main suppliers of smartwatches, but Intel wants in on everything.

And since its motto is “Intel Inside,” the company has made a mobile central processing unit, or rather System-on-Chip (SoC), just for them.

The processing platform is called Intel Quark, which was demonstrated as part of a smartwatch back in September 2013.

The Quark SoC X1000 is a single-core, single-thread unit with the Pentium instruction set architecture and standard I/O interfaces, including ACPI, PCI Express, 10/100Mb Ethernet, EHCI/OHCI USB host ports, USB 2.0 and high-speed UART, plus a RS-232 serial port.

It also comes with 16KB L1 cache, 512KB L2 cache, 8MB NOR flash, and a JTAG port for easy debug. The core clock is of 400 MHz.

That's the old Quark though. A new Quark is expected to be showcased at CES 2014, in Las Vegas, Nevada, from January 7 to 10.

That chip will power most of the new smartwatches, fitness trackers, eyewear etc., but some featuring the first SoC could make an appearance as well.

“Wearables is wide open. What you will see at CES is that we are actually going to bring some very innovative wearables to the show that are developed and manufactured here,” said Brian Krzanich, chief executive officer of Intel, in an interview with Recode.net.

“Our view is that Quark can make almost everything smart. We’ll show you some things that you would never have thought could become smart and communicate,” said Mr. Krzanich.

If a new chip does get released at CES, we should have the details on the specs sooner rather than later. Presumably, smartphones featuring Quark (the new Quark anyway) could appear as well, eventually. Most will probably only show up at Mobile World Congress though (24-27 February 2014).