Intel Says Its Button-Sized Curie Will Ship In Q1, Costing Under $10
Computing devices are getting smaller by the day, and today at CES in Las Vegas Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich announced new details about one of its big (little?) efforts in the space. Curie, Intel's button-sized wearable …
Context & Ripple Effects
Curie was announced at CES a year earlier as a concept: a button-sized system-on-chip module for low-power wearables (Intel's Curie module unveiling). In October, Intel gave it a concrete first customer — the low-cost Arduino 101 board would be the first product built on it.
Today's announcement closes the loop: Krzanich says Curie ships in Q1 at under $10, turning a CES demo into an actual component that makers and wearable builders can buy by the box. It matters because sub-$10 pricing puts wearable-grade sensing and compute inside hobbyist price ranges, not just OEM ones.
First-order effects
- Developers and makers building on Arduino 101 get a real ship date: the board they were announced against in October is now backed by a Q1 delivery of the underlying Curie module.
- Wearable and IoT product teams gain a sub-$10 reference design from Intel, lowering the bill-of-materials floor for embedding motion sensing and compute in small devices.
Second-order effects
- The module strategy extends rather than stops: by August Intel follows Curie with Joule, another developer-facing chip module aimed at cheap prototypes with computer vision (Joule module launch), signaling a product line, not a one-off.
- Cheap, standardized compute modules push differentiation downstream to software and enclosures — the same dynamic the Arduino 101 bet on when Intel chose an open maker platform as its first vehicle.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Intel's small-device roadmap keeps compressing form factors toward its endgame: 3D-stacked Lakefield silicon designed for foldable and dual-screen ultraportables (Lakefield details) — a decade-long arc from button-sized module to stacked ultra-mobile chips.
- Structurally, this points to compute becoming a commodity input for consumer hardware: when a full wearable SoC costs under $10, value migrates to whoever owns the design layer above it.
The trend: Intel is systematically shrinking and cheapening its compute modules — from the 2015 Curie unveiling through Joule and eventually 3D-stacked Lakefield — betting that tiny, low-cost silicon will seed new device categories beyond the PC.