Intel's Joule is Its Most Powerful Dev Kit Yet (engadget.com) 55
Devindra Hardawar, writing for Engadget: We've seen plenty of unique dev kits from Intel, including the SD card-sized Edison, but not one as powerful as this. Intel announced Joule today, a tiny maker board that will allow developers to test RealSense-powered concepts and, hopefully, bring the to the market faster than before. The company says the tiny, low-powered Joule would be ideal for testing concepts in robotics, AR, VR, industrial IoT and a slew of other industries. And it also looks like it could be an interesting way for students to dabble in RealSense's depth-sensing technology in schools. There will be two Joule kits to choose from: the 550x, which includes a 1.5GHz quad-core Atom T5500 processor, 3GB of RAM and 8GB of storage; and the 570x, which packs in a 1.7Ghz quad-core Atom T5700 CPU (with burst speeds up to 2.4GHz), 4GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. Both models include "laptop-class" 802.11AC wireless, Intel graphics with 4K capture and display support, and a Linux-based OS.
Pffff (Score:5, Informative)
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$369. No.
$5 yes ! .. Raspberry PI zero
$369 (Score:5, Informative)
16gb ssd (Score:2)
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No; he is saying, why the fuck is a device with the specs of a 2001 pc costing $369?
Look at Raspberry, Atmel, Microchip, and other companies. They have much lower specs, but are also actually affordable.
Who is going to buy this thing?
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Who is going to buy this thing?
People who need a higher specced board in a compact, low power configuration. Looks like this board is sold as a solution for applications like robotics, machine vision, and VR, which often requires a bit more processing power than a Raspberry Pi can offer. And it's $369 for the dev kit, the real question is what the price of the board alone will cost (especially in bulk).
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"Because the Intel Joule platform is based on an Intel® Atom SoC, transitioning a product design to high-volume production can be done with modest engineering expense, providing a mature platform for companies who require the option to scale down the road."
That suggests that the asking price, even in volume, is going to be at least modestly higher than the cost of stuffing the same parts onto your board; unless compactness is the only reason a custo
Re:16gb ssd (Score:4, Insightful)
The builtin wifi with piggytail antennae is a nice touch, but it is still a step backward from the minnowboard, imo.
Minnowboard has much less processing power and much less ram, but sports an actual sata interface.
Intel seems fixated on having the sdcard be the one and only storage device on these dev boards. Personally, i feel putting a real ssd on here, or a spspiny disk for swap/temp file userver makes the offering far more robust.
I see it has what looks like a mini pie riser zif connector over on the side there, but that means buying in even deeper into their proprietary hardware stream. I would rather have seen an M.2 socket with lock down screw on the back. That at least is industry standard hardware.
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> Intel seems fixated on having the sdcard be the one and only storage device on these dev boards. Personally, i feel putting a real ssd on here, or a spspiny disk for swap/temp file userver makes the offering far more robust.
Perhaps, but the eight gig model is enough to run an OS and a few chosen applications, which is what something like this is designed for. For more data intensive applications, there is a sixteen gig version. If you need extra storage (for video, maybe) then you could add an external
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You have to be kidding.
Unless it is USB 3.0, that port will saturate far faster than the sata2 port on the minnowboard.
An actual nvme based M.2 ssd put on would smoke both suggestions. If the device is running its own transactional database for object identification, having access times that fast becomes more than just a nice thing to have-- something i mention because of the suggested use case for the board, from intel themselves.
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Yeah that is true, they come out with new generations of products too quickly. My guess is this thing is targeted at businesses, but I assume a big enough company developing with Atom already has their own tools and doesn't need this. I just don't know who the target audience for this thingis.
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The size of the production run has a lot to do with the pricing.
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That's probably three times the cost of the actual computers people are using to develop for the Rasperry Pi...
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Can you recommend an equivalent ARM based board?
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See, it works like this:
Step 1: Intel maker board for $369.
Step 2: Bring the _____ to the market faster than before.
Step 3: Profit!
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Not sure you quite understand their market.
Look at what DIN mounted automation controls cost.
Looks like the first two posters... (Score:2, Insightful)
have never bought a dev kit in the real world before, and believe me there's a world of difference between these things and a Raspberry Pi.
$369? Intel priced these to move.
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The people that want to develop for this platform will pay. They will be making money with the results.
Me, I'm hoping to manage my 3D printer with one Pi, and my garage door with another. Not a big money maker, either.
Re:Looks like the first two posters... (Score:4, Insightful)
369$ for a development tool that is well documented?
In the corporate development world that is pretty much giving them away.
Re:Looks like the first two posters... (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading these comments make me question how much experience some people actually have with corporate development tools.
The compilers for our development tools cost more than this thing.
Re:Looks like the first two posters... (Score:4, Interesting)
Reading these comments make me question how much experience some people actually have with corporate development tools.
The compilers for our development tools cost more than this thing.
Compared to the costs of sourcing parts and developing and manufacturing a custom board, $369 is free.
If you're learning to wiggle gpio pins, a Pi might do you, but if you're doing something that requires a scalable platform that's going into real products, you will want these things available to you to oil the wheels of development.
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I'm still developing for a sub 100 MHz PPC in an embedded environment. These things are nothing short of magic.
Re:Looks like the first two posters... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm still developing for a sub 100 MHz PPC in an embedded environment. These things are nothing short of magic.
There should always be respect for a processor with an EIEIO instruction.
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There should always be respect for a processor with an EIEIO instruction.
When I was in industry and we (briefly) changed to PPC we had a field engineer come over and present the architecture etc.
And as luck would have it his name was MacDonald... He started by telling us all that, yes, the connection between his surname name and the EIEIO-insn had not been lost on his colleagues. In fact he heard it hummed in the corridors at least once a day when he walked by. :-)
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We are talking here about a kit with the capabilities of a very basic PC running Linux, so many open source compiler are available.
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Ding Ding Ding.
Now put those two pieces of information together and you realize why the price isn't a problem at all.
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What two pieces of information ?
There are many others ARM based kits that brings comparable capabilities and also run Linux (with open source compilers) for a fraction of the Intel price.
For most embedded projects, especially those running Linux, the instruction set architecture weight as much as a photo in the design decision. I myself run many armhf and arm64 architecture based embedded boards with the exact same Debian distribution that I run on my amd64 architecture workstations, laptop and servers.
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photo -> photon, sorry for the typo.
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RealSense == 3D camera. (Score:3)
At first sight, it looks like this is a horribly overpriced tiny-Linux gizmo - but what I think people here are missing is the important fact that it includes an integrated RealSense 3D camera...over 300 bucks for a $10 computer is a lot - but the RealSense 3D camera was selling for over $100 a few months ago - and that was a gigantic thing compared to this.
So, while I think they should be selling this for $50 to get more people interested in using it - I don't think it's surprising that they're asking so much as a "dev kit". The original RealSense dev kit (just the camera) was (IIRC) $200 - but included support from Intel engineers for serious developers.
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All the announcements and spec sheets say that they "Support for the Intel RealSense cameras and libraries", not that it has a RealSense 3D camera built in. Where did you see that the camera was built in, that as you say, we're missing?
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Oh - well if that's the case then it makes no sense. The RealSense camera dev kit interfaces via USB...why wouldn't you just use a RaspPi Zero for $9 rather than the $300+ Intel board? Plus, RealSense is only available for developers - they make you sign an agreement not to use it in any actual product!
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In other words, it's really a devkit for the camera, not the CPU. But they can't miss the opportunity for another chance at forcing x86 into the embedded space.
Intel still hasn't gotten the clue that most people don't care about or don't even want to go near x86 (or x64) for embedded computing. It's a hammer looking for a nail. The only thing x86 ever had going for it was the momentum of decades of MS-DOS and its follow-ons. It's a really mediocre architecture full of bodges on top of warts, and it would h
bringing the to the market. (Score:2)
SD-card sized? (Score:2)
Intel's Roadmap is really confusing... (Score:3)
Okay, they cancel Broxton, but then they release this. So, smartphones and tablets are out, but this is a great prototyping board for industrial IoT and other smart devices? Look, if they don't have a story on cellular network capabilities, nobody is going to care, and if they do have a story there, then they didn't really leave those markets. Does the Surface Phone crawl along, zombie like, after all? At any rate, Intel has a lot of work to do in the embedded space. A lot.
Intel becoming a dinosaur (Score:2)
This is why Intel is becoming irrelevant in the embedded space.
While I am sure that this is not meant as a raspberry pi killer, the lack of a low cost Intel platform means that all cool interesting stuff is being done on ARM.
Not only that but the next generation of embedded engineers will grow up knowing about the ARM architecture, and Intel will become increasingly marginalized.
If I was Intel I would produce a $30 board, put on a version of vxworks linux (also Intel owned) and give them out to schools at
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How's the software support? (Score:2)
Broken drivers. Broken build environments. Undocumented pin muxing. Undocumented power management. Undocumented everything. Proprietary, unavailable tools needed to reconfigure things. They took a half-finished, 30% functional board support package, excreted