Intel announces the new, low-cost Arduino 101 will be the first product to use its button-sized Curie system-on-chip module made for low-power wearables
This new Arduino board is the first product to use Intel's Curie module — This year at CES, Intel introduced Curie …
Context & Ripple Effects
Intel introduced Curie at CES in January 2015 as a button-sized module aimed at wearables, but until now it existed only as a demo-stage promise. Naming the low-cost Arduino 101 as the first shipping product turns that promise into silicon on a developer desk — and gives Curie its proving ground outside Intel's own reference designs.
The move matters because Intel is entering the sub-$10 embedded market through the maker channel rather than through OEM design wins, a route competitors read closely.
First-order effects
- Arduino developers get immediate access to wearable-class, low-power silicon in a cheap, familiar board form factor, making the 101 the first place Curie's capabilities can be tested at scale by hobbyists and prototypers.
- Curie moves from CES concept to validated product line, with Intel confirming it will ship in volume in Q1 at under $10 per module.
Second-order effects
- ARM answers directly in the same segment, announcing the Cortex A32 CPU designed for wearables, IoT, embedded systems, and low-cost boards like the Raspberry Pi — putting an ARM alternative in front of the same developers Intel is courting.
- Intel doubles down on the module-for-developers playbook rather than retreating, following up with Joule, a module aimed at bringing computer vision into cheap prototypes.
Third-order effects
- Maker boards are becoming a deliberate go-to-market channel for chip vendors: cheap dev kits seed the embedded and IoT ecosystem before commercial design wins follow, shifting competition from raw CPU specs toward integrated, power-optimized modules.
- If the pattern holds, the low-cost board market becomes a contested beachhead between x86-module and ARM-core vendors, forcing both sides to keep iterating entry-level silicon — as seen with Intel's Apollo Lake refresh of Atom-based cheap devices alongside ARM's Cortex A32.
The trend: Chipmakers are using low-cost maker and developer boards as the launch vehicle for low-power IoT silicon, turning hobbyist ecosystems into the first battleground for wearable and embedded module markets.