14 DAY TRIAL // Wearable electronic gadgets are one type of product where Intel hasn't managed to get a foothold. You'll find no “Intel inside” logo on them. Still, Chipzilla is trying to change that, and the launch of two new Quark SoCs is the latest means to do that.
Quark is the brand under which the company is selling its processors (SoCs really, system-on-chip devices) aimed at wearable electronics.
That means that the Santa Clara, California-based chip giant has every intention of stealing some of the share away from ARM and its partners.
It's slow going, partly because the x86 architecture is still playing catch-up in terms of power efficiency, and partly because the chip line that can more or less compete on that front is made of a single SoC: the Quark X1000.
That won't be the case for long, though. Intel may not have made a thundering announcement about it, but the world still took notice of the additions to the Quark line.
Indeed, Intel has added two new models, called Quark X1010 and X1020D, both of them featuring ECC memory support and (on the X1020D) Secure Boot technology.
That's the only perceivable difference, though, between them and the X1000, since they both have a clock of 400 MHz, 16 KB of unified L1 cache memory, a Floating Point Unit, and 512 KB of embedded SRAM.
The SRAM can even be mapped into the system memory as a single 512 KB block, or 128 4KB blocks. So you don't have to concern yourself with incompatibility or wasted resources if you include some discrete RAM chips too.
Not that it's all that easy to insert any sort of chip into smartwatches or smartbands. There's not exactly all that much space after all, hence the struggles to combine as many features as possible into the SoC itself.
Moving on, the Quark X1010 and X1020D support DDR3-800 memory, PCI Express 2.0, USB 2.0, 10/100 Mb Ethernet, high-speed UART and some other interfaces. All in all, they have thermal design power (TDP) of 2.2 Watts.
The prices of the Intel Quark X1010 and X1020D are $10.17 / €7.32 and $10.70 / €7.69, respectively, which are less than a dollar more than that of the X1000. Don't expect to see any of them up for sale though. They are only available to companies that want to create a smartband, smartwatch, wearable fitness trackers, that sort of thing.
Depending on how fast deals are struck and R&D efforts progress, there might soon be lots of things like Huawei Talkband B1 for sale, only based on x86 instead of ARM.