Quark Adds Muscle to Intel in the IoT World

We have been hearing about Intel’s Quark processor, which is based on its good old Pentium, making waves in IoT world. The CPU core of Quark is said to be the smallest in Intel. It is supposed to be inexpensive and extremely low in power; a perfect combination for IoT devices. The Pentium architecture equips the processor to perform on the edge as well as the gateways where data analysis becomes important. Without analysis, the data from an IoT device can be useless. It’s the analytics which makes the data meaningful for its connection with the internet in the IoT world. Also, Intel has different versions of Quark SoC to cater to the requirements of different segments of IoT.

Intel already has a Quark SoC X1000 based IoT platform built on open architecture which can be used by customers or developers to develop customized platforms for different applications. The gateway development kit provides an option for different processors to be used, e.g. Intel Quark SoC X1000 or Intel Quark SoC X1020D. The SoC enables the complete IoT ecosystem from the edge to the data center. In a brief video Intel demonstrated this to be working perfectly for industrial, energy and transportation segments of IoT.

In transportation segment, you can get the data from the power transmission through the cloud and that can be used in different applications as desired to control and monitor the transportation. The data can be used in commercial applications by transportation companies as well as personal applications such as monitoring of driving styles by individuals. The Quark chip can be used as a gateway or a sensor to stream data to the cloud.

In industrial applications such as building management systems, it can be used to sense data from major components such as heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) and send that to the cloud, thus enabling monitoring and controlling of the building in the most cost effective and efficient manner.

For developers to get started quickly with this IoT platform, they can buy readily available Galileo boards at very low prices at ~$60, put the applications on top of the professional grade Linux and then design their own custom boards.

You can view a brief demo at Intel website hereafter a quick registration. Peter Dice, Software Architect at Intelexplains very concisely about the working of the Intel Quark SoC X1000 based system which perfectly fits into the IoT applications.

There are many developers contributing to the IoT innovation with Quark. The Intel’s Embedded Design Centre provides hardware, software and solutions for embedded and IoT developers who can use them to effectively participate in the IoT development. There are product examples available for the new developers to go through.

This year, Intel IoT Gateways will come pre-integrated with the Wind River Edge Management System (EMS), a cloud-based IoT platform that enables devices to securely connect to a centralized console. Also, IoT solution needs to be interoperable because many devices in the system would be based on existing legacy system. Intel, McAfee and Wind River together provide an interoperable, secure and scalable IoT platform that can seamlessly work with third party solutions as well.

Pawan Kumar Fangaria
Founder & President at www.fangarias.com