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Thursday, June 22, 2017

Intel pulls Quark from the IoT

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Intel is discontinuing its IoT boards based around the Quark processor. The Pentium II architecture processor was launched in 2013 as a competitor to ARM-based devices, and despite small form factor development boards such as the Joule, and giving away thousands of the Arduino-compatible Galileo, it failed to make headway in IoT designs.

The Joule and Galileo boards, as well as the Atom-based Edison 'PC-on-an-SD-card' are shown as discontinued in Intel's database, with final shipments in December. For customers such as Kontron who designed Quark into an IoT gateway this may be a problem, and long term supply for IoT was one of the issues raised back at the launch.


The Quark continues to be used in the Curie module for wearable applications.

Intel continues to target IoT designs with the Atom, which has a later x86 microarchitecture than Quark. The MinnowBoard 3 is planned for launch in the Autumn and uses the Atom E3900 processor that is taking the lead for IoT designs.

The MinnowBoard project supports Open Source Hardware by making designs publicly available for the community. The open source UEFI firmware, based on EDK II, is being made available in advance of the hardware release. Developers can download pre-built UEFI firmware images, utilities, binary object modules, and project release notes from the TianoCore GitHub: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2-platforms/tree/devel-MinnowBoard3. There is a range of dual and quad core Minnow boards (Minnow Turbot, Minnow Max) developed by Minnowboard.org.

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