Intel's Edison: a 22nm dual-core PC the size of an SD card, runs Linux, has built-in WiFi and Bluetooth modules
Intel announces Edison: a 22nm dual-core PC the size of an SD card — Four months ago, Intel unveiled its Quark SoC at IDF. Today at CES 2014, company CEO Brian Krzanich wants …
Context & Ripple Effects
Edison is the first product out of the Quark line Intel unveiled at IDF four months earlier, and it lands squarely inside the strategy CEO Brian Krzanich laid out in his CES 2014 keynote, which press coverage framed as a pivot toward wearables and connected devices — the same speech where he retired the McAfee brand in favor of Intel Security. The announcement traveled unusually wide for a single product reveal, picked up the same day by The Verge, Computerworld, NYT Bits, IntoMobile and The Next Web alongside Intel's dual-boot Windows/Android device news.
The form factor itself extends a thread Intel has been pulling since at least 2007, when it pitched putting the Internet in your pocket: a full 22nm dual-core Linux computer, radios included, shrunk to SD-card size so it can disappear inside someone else's product.
First-order effects
- Developers targeting the wearables and connected-device space Krzanich staked out in the keynote get an x86-compatible Linux computer with WiFi and Bluetooth integrated, removing the need to assemble a board plus separate radio modules.
- Intel gains a showcase part for CES that demonstrates Quark can ship as a finished, integrable module rather than remaining a slide-deck SoC.
Second-order effects
- Embedded and maker-oriented silicon vendors now compete against a package that bundles compute and radios in an SD-card footprint, pushing differentiation toward power draw, price and software ecosystems.
- Pairing Edison with the Intel Security rebrand announced in the same keynote lets Intel pitch security as part of the stack for the connected devices it wants built on its silicon.
Third-order effects
- If Edison's pattern holds, the general-purpose computer stops being a product and becomes a commodity component dropped into clothing, appliances and instruments — with Intel recasting itself from PC chip supplier to enabler of other companies' devices, the explicit framing of its CES keynote.
- Widespread embeddable computers raise the stakes on device security and identity management, which is exactly where Intel Security, launched the same day, positions itself.
The trend: Intel is shrinking the full x86 computer down to component size to claim a founding role in the wearables and Internet-of-things markets it spent its CES 2014 keynote defining.