5 ms·

I wonder how much of a difference it would make if Intel made and sold boards that were identical in size and price to the Raspberry Pi and were full systems fo

by mikece 6y ago

I wonder how much of a difference it would make if Intel made and sold boards that were identical in size and price to the Raspberry Pi and were full systems for hacking and/or IoT development. I think that would be a wildly popular item.

wronglebowski 6y ago
If they wanted to stem the ARM tide they would do exactly this. Unfortunately they don't seem to be able to see the value in anything beyond direct profit ventures. The Pi foundation has deep ties to Broadcom, so Intel would have to start something from the ground up. I still think it would be immensely worth it.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  They just need a reference design than can be manufactured and sold for profit in the 20-30 range. And make sure their fabs can deliver at volume without breaking them, which is iffy - every Atom wafer sold is one less Xeon wafer to sell.
- deelowe 6y ago
  I don't think the PI was the major misstep for Intel. It was the low power device revolution which led up to cellphones. Silicon has become a commodity business. Companies can pretty easily get a contract set up with one of the major foundries and begin cranking out chips in mere months. While Intel was focused on larger and more complex chips aimed at high performance compute, others were focused on battery powered small form factor devices. Once ARM became the de-facto standard for these, it was only a matter of time before Intel building it's own foundries would become a liability. History doesn't always repeat, but it sure does rhyme. There's a lot of parallels here to Microsoft and the PC industry.
dbcurtis 6y ago
Did you hear of the Edison board? Sank like a stone. And like many things Intel lost interest. Intel is culturally incapable of doing long-attention-span products. They only succeed with fire-and-forget products. Sustained effort over the long haul is just not in their DNA.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  It was more expensive, though. Edison and Galileo were overpriced and feature-poor - you need to add your own serial console, which, compared to an RPi (and the majority of these SBCs), is a major nuisance.
  - mtgx 6y ago
    > It was more expensive, though Exactly Intel's problem with these things. They are always too expensive compared to the competition. It's the #1 reason they failed in mobile, too. Their similar performance Atom chips cost 2x more than the highest-end Arm chip.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  They priced it like any other dev board (which is maybe how they thought about it?). It was comparatively unaffordable for hobbyists. They also didn't advertise it very well either as far as I know. I only knew about it because of DigiKey.
- awalton 6y ago
  It's so much this. Intel showed up with a proprietary 70 pin fine pitch SMT connector, a 1.8V power requirement and sold the Edison to high level designers, when the market they were after (the Rasp-PI folks) had extremely easy to integrate fat header pins that are 5V tolerant and beginner friendly. You needed a breakout board and hours of tinkering to get the thing to a state that you get out of the box from the ARM offering. Galileo was as close as they came to a home run though. It really was their run at a Rasp-pi-alike, but it was almost twice as expensive, wasn't compatible with the Rasp-Pi headers (though it oddly was with Arduino, which seemed like a real design impedance mismatch), and was lacking numerous peripherals like video out. They had a similar problem with that whole Maker-targeted series of chips - they couldn't seem to decide if they wanted to capture the ease of use of Arduino or the deep integrator capabilities of these target-specific MCUs and really failed to split the difference. They also failed to take into account that they were very much the minority player and any sort of entry into those markets would be a war of attrition and not just overnight success... and the billion dollar juggernaut did what billion dollar juggernauts do to side projects that aren't overnight successes - they killed it before anyone could even develop competence working with them. Both Edison and Quark really had niches they could have well serviced, if they had given it a real try... but it was very apparent that management wasn't interested and the designers didn't understand who they were targeting.
rrss 6y ago
The Intel Edison, Galileo, Curie, and Joule boards were roughly similar to what you propose. They were all discontinued in 2017.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  Those boards were the right form. The problem they did not realize was their price was 5x what it needed to be to compete.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    And, IIRC, the Quark X chip in the Galileo board sold for like $5 in quantities. I've been thinking of how to build educational clusters with chips like these (current candidate is the Octavo SoM that a TI Sitara core, RAM, some flash, an SD controller and two Ethernet ports) that could have a couple dozen nodes, connected by one or two Ethernet switches, all assembled on a single PCB. A bit like the Pine 64 Sopine clusters, but with more, simpler nodes. The built in Flash can be used to network boot the node, eliminating a large cost in external flash.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - wronglebowski 6y ago
    Exactly, they shouldn't be designed to be major profit product. They should be sold at cost to support their ecosystem.
slezyr 6y ago
None. No, seriously. The biggest advantage of RaspPi is the Linux support. Install and play. Atom? Only recently it started to run without hopelessly freezing and a whole lot of patches on top of mainline kernel.

by mikece 6y ago

wronglebowski 6y ago

If they wanted to stem the ARM tide they would do exactly this. Unfortunately they don't seem to be able to see the value in anything beyond direct profit ventures. The Pi foundation has deep ties to Broadcom, so Intel would have to start something from the ground up. I still think it would be immensely worth it.

rbanffy 6y ago
They just need a reference design than can be manufactured and sold for profit in the 20-30 range. And make sure their fabs can deliver at volume without breaking them, which is iffy - every Atom wafer sold is one less Xeon wafer to sell.
deelowe 6y ago
I don't think the PI was the major misstep for Intel. It was the low power device revolution which led up to cellphones. Silicon has become a commodity business. Companies can pretty easily get a contract set up with one of the major foundries and begin cranking out chips in mere months. While Intel was focused on larger and more complex chips aimed at high performance compute, others were focused on battery powered small form factor devices. Once ARM became the de-facto standard for these, it was only a matter of time before Intel building it's own foundries would become a liability. History doesn't always repeat, but it sure does rhyme. There's a lot of parallels here to Microsoft and the PC industry.

dbcurtis 6y ago

Did you hear of the Edison board? Sank like a stone. And like many things Intel lost interest. Intel is culturally incapable of doing long-attention-span products. They only succeed with fire-and-forget products. Sustained effort over the long haul is just not in their DNA.

rbanffy 6y ago
It was more expensive, though. Edison and Galileo were overpriced and feature-poor - you need to add your own serial console, which, compared to an RPi (and the majority of these SBCs), is a major nuisance.
- mtgx 6y ago
  > It was more expensive, though Exactly Intel's problem with these things. They are always too expensive compared to the competition. It's the #1 reason they failed in mobile, too. Their similar performance Atom chips cost 2x more than the highest-end Arm chip.
guerrilla 6y ago
They priced it like any other dev board (which is maybe how they thought about it?). It was comparatively unaffordable for hobbyists. They also didn't advertise it very well either as far as I know. I only knew about it because of DigiKey.
awalton 6y ago
It's so much this. Intel showed up with a proprietary 70 pin fine pitch SMT connector, a 1.8V power requirement and sold the Edison to high level designers, when the market they were after (the Rasp-PI folks) had extremely easy to integrate fat header pins that are 5V tolerant and beginner friendly. You needed a breakout board and hours of tinkering to get the thing to a state that you get out of the box from the ARM offering. Galileo was as close as they came to a home run though. It really was their run at a Rasp-pi-alike, but it was almost twice as expensive, wasn't compatible with the Rasp-Pi headers (though it oddly was with Arduino, which seemed like a real design impedance mismatch), and was lacking numerous peripherals like video out. They had a similar problem with that whole Maker-targeted series of chips - they couldn't seem to decide if they wanted to capture the ease of use of Arduino or the deep integrator capabilities of these target-specific MCUs and really failed to split the difference. They also failed to take into account that they were very much the minority player and any sort of entry into those markets would be a war of attrition and not just overnight success... and the billion dollar juggernaut did what billion dollar juggernauts do to side projects that aren't overnight successes - they killed it before anyone could even develop competence working with them. Both Edison and Quark really had niches they could have well serviced, if they had given it a real try... but it was very apparent that management wasn't interested and the designers didn't understand who they were targeting.

rrss 6y ago

The Intel Edison, Galileo, Curie, and Joule boards were roughly similar to what you propose. They were all discontinued in 2017.

sumtechguy 6y ago
Those boards were the right form. The problem they did not realize was their price was 5x what it needed to be to compete.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  And, IIRC, the Quark X chip in the Galileo board sold for like $5 in quantities. I've been thinking of how to build educational clusters with chips like these (current candidate is the Octavo SoM that a TI Sitara core, RAM, some flash, an SD controller and two Ethernet ports) that could have a couple dozen nodes, connected by one or two Ethernet switches, all assembled on a single PCB. A bit like the Pine 64 Sopine clusters, but with more, simpler nodes. The built in Flash can be used to network boot the node, eliminating a large cost in external flash.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wronglebowski 6y ago
  Exactly, they shouldn't be designed to be major profit product. They should be sold at cost to support their ecosystem.

slezyr 6y ago

None. No, seriously. The biggest advantage of RaspPi is the Linux support. Install and play. Atom? Only recently it started to run without hopelessly freezing and a whole lot of patches on top of mainline kernel.