14 DAY TRIAL // At the Consumer Electronics Show 2014, which took place in Las Vegas, Nevada 2 weeks ago, Intel expressed its decision to enter the wearable gadget market and showed off a few things, things that, it turns out, might not have “Intel Inside” at all.
Or at least they don't only have Intel chips inside. In particular, the Jarvis headset is said to possess a different processor, based on ARM even.
Thus, Jarvis may have just become the strangest of the oddities that were shown there, and that's saying a lot considering that the others were a smartwatch and a charging bowl.
According to PCMag, an insider tip said that the Jarvis smart headset (made so that it can hang off your ear) used an ARM chip instead of an Intel one.
Intel confirmed that some of the wearable hardware used "third-party parts" but did not actually confirm the tip.
It sounds an awful lot like a deflection, but it is, unfortunately, all we have at the moment. People probably wouldn't have even been bothered by the revelation had Intel not heavily implied that it was only showing off its own tech.
After all, the whole point (or almost the whole point) of the company's presence at CES 2014 was to draw attention towards the Quark and Edison processors.
And when you're trying to convince the whole world to buy your chips over those from ARM, using ARM chips to power your demo items kind of defeats the purpose.
Then again, Intel does have a license for ARM technology, and if it's going to start making units for clients like Marvell, it may just as easily make some for itself or work with others to come up with prototypes.
No clue where things will go from here. Intel might just deflect or choose not to comment until its Quark SoCs are ready to power wearables, as it promised it would. Once gadgets powered by it start showing up, this issue will likely get sidelined.