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The End of Arduino 101: Intel Leaves Maker Market
- zitterbewegung 9y agoIntel attempting to make a play in the maker market with their x86 cores seem attractive to many software developers. Partnering with arduino was a good move for usability but the boards that they were competing with were players like Beagle board and Raspberry Pi. Realistically they could try to be in third place but to unseat ARM boards proved to be too difficult.
- faragon 9y agoIntel could make tons of money by licensing their IP so 5-10 USD SoC could flood the IoT market.
- sigstoat 9y agointel IP just doesn't even offer anything in that space. who cares about x86-compatibility when you're doing new firmware? it's a horrorshow compared to what ARM provides. i don't need AVX extensions or whatever, i need sane and plentiful interrupts, a reasonable memory model, simple IO, etc.
- joezydeco 9y agoSo, an Intel 8051.
- sigstoat 9y agolacks "sane and plentiful interrupts" and "reasonable memory model". so, no.
- joezydeco 9y agoOkay, but could the 8051 have made a decent foundation for a small, cheap 8/16 bit core? Intel could have literally given the parts away. The obvious answer is that Intel couldn't monetize it like the x86, so there we go.
- Narishma 9y agoClones/derivatives of which are available from dozens of companies.
- StavrosK 9y agoWas Intel ever seriously in the maker market? As a maker, I feel that it was kind of an afterthought for them. The Edison looked great on paper, but the price was wrong, the tooling was inadequate, and the whole attempt felt like an enterprise was just trying to cargo-cult its way into some marketshare.
- thom_nic 9y agoIt never made sense for Intel to enter this market to begin with. Opportunities that move the needle for a company like Intel come in sizes of 100s of millions $ or more. The maker market is just not that big. "IoT" however is - from industrial to home automation and everything in between where sensors, controllers and networks get added to traditionally analog or un-networked technology. If you look at what Intel was selling, that's the market that Intel's products were actually geared toward. Look at the price, specs and form factor of the Edison. Now imagine that Intel was really trying to push into the IoT space, it is a good play considering they failed to break into mobile. These products were really competing against companies like Phytec, Variscite, Compulab, Toradex, Myir and Olimex who make ARM-based modules for embedded networked products. Why they pushed so hard to market to the maker community instead of commercial IoT is sort of beyond me. Marketing to makers helps gain mindshare and familiarity with your product (but x86 is already ubiquitous.) For comparison, I wonder how much Atmel's bottom line has been affected by Arduino, or RPi for Broadcom. Why Intel couldn't get their act together to make a well-supported compelling product for commercial IoT applications is baffling. That's where they really failed.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoI feel like Atmel and Broadcom will see more of an uptick in sales as makers finish college and get jobs doing actual engineering. If you've been building things using Atmel chips in your spare time they'll be familiar, you'll probably reach for them first when designing something for a job, and one product using a chip can lead to millions sold. Even if only a small handful of engineers converted to using their stuff instead of PIC/STM/TI/etc due to the Maker movement it's still potentially a huge payout. And considering that they didn't even pay to create Arduino it's even better!
- gonewest 9y agoBecause no one looks at an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi and says, "I would pay top dollar for a version of this thing that has x86 instructions."
- zild3d 9y agoYep, 8 bit 8MHz microcontrollers are already plenty of power for a lot of hobbyist applications. And if not there are plenty of super cheap (<$5) boards with ARM 32 bit processors, or wifi/bluetooth built in
- rasz 9y agoand even if someone says that, they can go right ahead and buy laptop motherboard for raspbery pi price (thinkpad X220 motherboard = ~$20)
- soneil 9y agoIt probably would have got further if they actually managed that properly. eg, https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=738575 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=738575 Once you make your 'x86' incompatible enough that it won't actually run glibc fully, you've negated the whole point of having x86 in the first place. Intel's "strategy" with Quark etc has been to to sell you on the idea of a ubiquitous platform, and then provide a niche platform that looks "mostly similar" to the ubiquity you were promised.
- askvictor 9y agoAnd also failing on the Arduino bit (Galileo's IO timing was too slow to use with many commonplace sensors)
- dman 9y agoIntels addiction to high margin products might prove to be their undoing as they get disrupted from below.
- MrBuddyCasino 9y agoHistory repeats itself.
- elijahparker 9y agoAs someone who spent a bit of time trying to start a project based on the Edison, the most frustrating thing was the amount of bugs and the lack of documentation to be able to do anything about it myself, leaving me hopelessly waiting for them to release fixes. For example, after several months of terribly slow and buggy SPI and no fix over multiple releases, I finally switched to ARM and am very glad I did. Intel did finally fix the SPI issue about 9 months after it was first reported. With ARM, I had plenty of issues and challenges, but had the documentation and resources I needed to be able to fix things, as well as a better support community. One of the key issues in the Intel support communities was a growing lack of trust, now confirmed by Intel dropping out. It takes a big commitment to really understand a system, and the nice thing about ARM is that the community goes beyond a single company, so a company dropping out is not as significant as in this case with Intel.
- VHRanger 9y ago> lack of documentation For what it's worth, I think it's an intel trademark to have bad or lacking documentation. Even projects that should have stellar documentation like intel TBB or MKL have fairly cryptic docs
- lotyrin 9y agoThey somehow think "Intel Inside" marketing strategy worked (not that Wintel monopoly happened) and they think that they can just "Intel Inside" their way into any market, and somehow make Wintel-like margins even in b2b markets that are fully commoditized, not need to put out competitive parts or reduce adoption costs with things like documentation.
- syntheticnature 9y agoIndeed. I attempted to do some node.js prototyping (since it was one of the directly-supported environments, supposedly) -- but they never pushed any sort of update, such that one was stuck on a (by node standards) ancient version.
- jaymzcampbell 9y agoI'm not very surprised with this. Quite a long time ago I came across their Galileo boards but for the price point it just did not seem worth it - 2 - 4 times the price of a RasperryPi or Uno. The appeal/benefit of having x86 was just never there for me or the agency I was at. I could see how it might be useful if you are writing a lot of assembly and low level at that but this seemed too much of a niche with the way they were marketed. If it had networking and I could use it with Python I was happy.
- rhinoceraptor 9y agoAlso, with Arduino you can easily and cheaply buy more ATmega328 DIPs and put them on protoboard for an embedded project. I built a little server rack temperature monitor (which collects data from a couple sensors and provides a simple REST service over ethernet) that way, all you need to run the ATmega328 by itself is about 50 cents worth of components.
- beagle3 9y agox86 has two things going for it: Microsoft Windows x86/AMD64 compatibility, and highest possible performance (not performance per watt; absolute attainable performance). If you don't need either, it is expensive in cost, power or both. And in the IoT/Maker world, one rarely needs computing power on the device itself (and Galileo doesn't really provide a lot of computing power), or wants to pay for a windows license per device (and deal with activation, etc)
- wiremine 9y agoI work on IoT projects professionally, and we see a large gap between makers-grade hardware and production-quality systems. Every week we talk with startups and enterprise customers who start off on something like an Arduino, only to hit a wall because there is no good way to take it to production. IMHO, the market is ripe for a hardware/software platform that bridges the ease of Arduino with a path to production. A bunch of the silicon vendors are in this space, but they offer weak solutions, and things like AWS IoT are really bad on the hardware side.
- robertelder 9y agoI'd be interested to hear more about which specific features of maker-grade hardware are particularly problematic for taking things to production.
- howard941 9y agoProvisioning more than one ethernet PHY is an issue. There aren't a lot of choices for two or more PHYs at a reasonable (singe $ digits in medium quantities) cost
- avs733 9y agoto what others are mentioning I will add: -stability -recoverability / error handling -quality of construction -documentation -ease of use/support/baked in features
- dsacco 9y agoCan you be a bit more specific, maybe with an example issue?
- ianhowson 9y ago* Cost. Maker-grade stuff costs 10-100x what a production embedded does. You're leaving a lot of money on the table. * There's no guarantee of long-term support; RPi and Arduino both regularly change form factors. They make no guarantees that they will continue manufacturing what you're already committed to. * Maker vs. production system architectures are totally different. Linux is rare among production systems. It just needs too much hardware (see Cost). So you have to rebuild the thing anyway when cost-reduction time comes. 'Production' means different things to different people, of course. I'm thinking of a world where you want to ship 10k+ units of a device. If you're only shipping 100 units, your concerns are very different.
- petra 9y agoI wonder if all those declarations by Intel are just a game: Declare something big/interesting with tons of media etc - stock picks up by x%, than a few years afterwards, cancel it without a fanfare, stock goes down by much less than x%. Intel wins. For those knowledgeable about the stock market, could it be the case ? Because that would be a good explain why did Intel enter this field, which is is a very poor fit for it - unless they come with some breakthrough.
- jaymzcampbell 9y agoSpeaking of poor fits I'm still astounded they bought McAfee.
- euyyn 9y agoThe stock price is driven by what investors think the company is worth. For what you describe to work, investors would need to calculate that the investment Intel made here was profitable (via the sales made, for example), thus adding value to the company. At which point you couldn't really see it as a "game", but a good investment that was now ended.
- petra 9y agoThat's only one parts of what deteremines the stocks' worth. There's also predictions of future growth.
- euyyn 9y agoBut it's hard to see cancelling a product as a cause of growth.
- georgeecollins 9y agoCanceling an unsuccessful project can trigger a growth in profits.
- 9y ago
- protomyth 9y agoIntel really seems to be stuck in their commodity PC / Server mentality. The number of customizations that are done these days in mobile and I suspect as things become cheaper IoT is pretty impressive. Intel hates customization since that means other people make money (see the whole NVidia Ion chipset saga). I just cannot see them making any headway with their current "must be high volume commodity product" attitude.
- Calamitous 9y agoWow, that was fast.
- skbohra123 9y agoGood riddance!
- wildpeaks 9y agoIt's quite unfortunate as they were a convenient middle ground between amateur and "we'll sell to you only if you order 500+ units" boards, and the brand was famous enough in less technical circles to help prototypes being taken seriously (given the technical side is rarely what kills off a project).
- qualitytime 9y agoI was lucky (or unlucky) enough to get hold of an intel gallileo at launch as a gift from intel. Unfortuantely the experience of using it was mediocre and am not the least bit surprised about this news.
- cushychicken 9y agoWell, that took a surprisingly long time to happen. The maker community represents a trivial (at best) contribution to Intel's bottom line. Intel's bread has always been buttered by delivering high-performance, server-grade chips to the people willing to pay for the cutting edge of performance. And every year, at that! That's pretty much the opposite of the maker market - people who are building electronics for fun, and not exactly flush with cash to spend on it. I'd wager that the net profit of any one of Intel's enterprise customers vastly outstrips the entirety of what they made on their entire maker line of chips and boards. Why would they bother diluting their production focus and stretching their support engineers thin, to help court and address the concerns of a bunch of spendthrift HW hackers and garage IoT operations?
- komali2 9y agoI always figured the hope was that some small percentage of the makers would develop an actual product with the platform, then continue to use their hardware as they scaled up to sale of thousands of devices.
- cushychicken 9y agoI'm sure it was. Two years seems like a pretty good amount of time to test the market for a semiconductor company. I think we're just seeing Intel's leadership decide that the test didn't generate sufficient interest.
- thesandlord 9y agoIBM used to make all of it's money from Mainframes, but then over the years commodity computers have gotten good enough to replace mainframes in most businesses. There are still some customers who need them, but the lion's share of the market is now dominated by commodity x86 servers. Now x86 is in the process of being disrupted. Look at ARM for example. Currently, most ARM chipsets are focused on mobile applications where low power is necessary. They are not powerful enough to compete with x86 on the server (yes I know there are ARM server parts, but it's still early days), but soon they will be for most customers. And at that point, the power/cost advantage will cause customers to switch over. This is already happening in laptops, with both Apple and Microsoft moving to ARM for their desktop OS. So I think it makes a lot of sense for Intel to try and address this concern, and competing with ARM/MIPS head on for the IoT market is one way to do this. IMO the mistake Intel made is trying to take their x86 process, which has a value chain designed to serve high margin server markets, and shoehorn it into the IoT market which is dominated by low margin, ultra cheap parts (think ESP8266). Take a look at this book for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma
- 0xbear 9y agoOne could argue the never actually entered the maker market. I can't name one prominent project that used any Intel maker oriented device. That's a monumental marketing/product development failure: offer overpriced products that don't really do much (if anything) new, then completely fail to get people interested in them. No one cares about your instruction set here, so you can't ride on that alone.
- acoye 9y agoI saw it coming when they discontinued Joule and Galileo. I actually liked the Curie chip, plenty of goodies in one die. From bluetooth LE to battery charger to accelerometer and gyro plus hardware acceleration for k nearest neighbor (cool for gesture recognition). All that on small form factor low energy die. Plus, I _feel_ safer using a curie for IoT than just using a raspberry pi and never updating a linux distro. https://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule-galileo-and-edison-product-lines/ https://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule-gal...
- rietta 9y agoReminds me of a saying that one of my startup mentors has said many times. "A great way to make a small fortune in home automation is to start with a large fortune." Seems that Intel is taking their step back rather than doubling down on the long game.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI think Intel realized that the 'maker market' is the craft/toy/hobby market not the embedded systems market. Intel is also dealing with threats to its core businesses so better to pull back from a marginal market that can't even support what were the two leading chip companies in the space (Atmel & Microchip) and focus on not losing market share to ARM in other areas.
- kazinator 9y agoNot the first time. Intel got into mobile devices circa 2000-2001 or so. Then suddenly they abandoned this area. I worked on a secure (authenticated, encrypted) port forwarding proxy for mobile devices at that time. Our company partnered with Intel to bring the software to their new mobile devices. We were quite far along, with working demos and all. Then one fine day, word came down from the higher levels in Intel that they are pulling out of that. The Intel team we collaborated with were split up and sent in different ways within Intel and that was that. It was bad for us because we put resources into it and were counting on some cash which never materialized, plus the dot com bust was in full downward swing.
- Best_Teaser 9y agoI'm just confused on what their end goal was here.
- rasz 9y agoEverything you need to know about joke of an Intel IoT/maker offering is right there in hackaday comments: "Chinese companies, even with a language barrier, are BETTER THAN INTEL at documentation"
- shusson 9y agoSounds like to me this is because the market for developing novel IOT devices is not as disruptive as previously thought.
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