Intel Fills Out IoT Portfolio

Platform gets chips, OSes, cloud software

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 03, 2015 –  Intel Corp. filled out its portfolio for the Internet of Things, announcing three Quark processors as well as two microcontroller-class operating systems and software for IoT cloud services. The news comes a week before rival Arm opens the doors on its annual conference in Silicon Valley and a year after Arm rolled out its own OS for IoT.

The race is on to establish end-to-end platforms for the Internet of Things that simplify choices in the fragmented sector. Everyone from top tier carriers such as Verizon to venture-funded startups and Intel's OEM customer Dell have rolled out new IoT platforms recently.

For its part, Intel announced the Quark SE SoC with an embedded sensor hub as well as pattern matching for handling some analytics processing. In addition, it announced the D1000 and D2000 microcontrollers.

Intel provided few details on the chips in a fact sheet posted online, however it did say the SE and D2000 support a full x86 instruction set. The D1000 is available now, the D2000 will be available by the end of the year and the Quark SE SOC will be available by June.

The microcontroller space is hotly competitive. A wide range of vendors are delivering Arm-based chips that compete with many well-entrenched proprietary architectures from companies ranging from Microchip to Synopsys.

Intel has slowly gained some traction in this space in the last two years. It's IoT group had revenues of more than $500 million in the PC giant's most recent quarter.

At the Intel event here, Honeywell demoed wearable systems using Quark for industrial and public-safety workers at an event here. Smart-building vendor Yanzi will use the Quark SoC it its sensor nodes.

Intel's Wind River division announced two IoT OSes. Rocket is a real-time operating system aimed at 32-bit microcontrollers. Pulsar is a small footprint version of Wind River's Linux, supporting 64- and 32-bit processors. Both can run on x86 or Arm chips.

In addition, Wind River announced three versions of software to handle  cloud computing for IoT deployments. Helix App Cloud, Lab Cloud and Device Cloud help build IoT applications, simulate and test and manage IoT systems, respectively.

The chip giant also announced new developer and partner programs for the software. Companies supporting it include Advantech, Autodesk, Avnet, Cypress, Freescale, HP Enterprise, Kontron, Microsoft, Oracle, PTC/Thingworx, Salesforce, Texas Instruments and Xilinx.

Intel also announced a Trusted Analytics Platform for developers and data scientists as part of a broad IoT reference architecture. TAP broadly addresses a range of sectors including healthcare, retail and industrial.

SAP said it will support an Intel IoT reference platform with its software. Levi Strauss & Co. showed a proof of concept for retail shops based on an Intel IoT reference design.

In a show of the strategic importance of the sector, chief executive Brian Krzanich joined a group of executives at the event including the heads of Intel's data center, IoT and software divisions.

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