One month ago I wrote about the Intel plans to penetrate the tablet market with their new quad core Bay Trail SoC. The ambitions were Intel to release low cost $5 chip which to compete with the ARM based Allwinner and Rockchip SOCs which dominate the low cost tablet market.
We all were wondering how this could happen as Intel design and production is focused on the expensive and powerful desktop/server processors which sells for $30-1000.
Now we know how this will be achieved 🙂 from this Press release. Intel has signed strategic Agreement with Rockchip to accelerate the Intel based solutions in Tablet market.
What does this means? Intel will licensee x86 Silvermount architecture to Rockchip and Intel’s 3G/LTE know how, so Rockchip will be able to design their own chips based on Intel’s architecture.
The first new chips will be available in 2015. This is very interesting move from Intel to penetrate the tablet market which was exclusively held by ARM devices.
olimex 
May 28, 2014 @ 09:35:52
x86 is still alive. Wow! What for do we (programmers) need such ancient architecture in embedded world?
May 29, 2014 @ 08:04:39
Yes x86 is ancient architecture, but ARM too is ancient. If I remember correctly it is made in the beginning of 90. This is more than 20 year.
May 28, 2014 @ 10:08:41
“Intel design and production is focused on the expensive and powerful desktop/server processors which sells for $30-1000.”
Well, their server processors sell for up to $7000 a piece :):
http://ark.intel.com/products/75258/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E7-8890-v2-37_5M-Cache-2_80-GHz
You can buy 1000 AllWinner A20 SoCs for that price 🙂
May 28, 2014 @ 10:31:12
Intel is copycating ARM strategy … meanwhile MIPS is copycatin Linaro with prpl … battle of the platforms continues 🙂
May 28, 2014 @ 15:44:19
Cheap tablets with cooling fans? Bleah!
May 28, 2014 @ 17:29:38
your info is obsolete, now Intel have low power ARM like devices (Atom Bay Trail) and ARM have high performance energy swallowing devices like Intel. So generally both offer about same in the low power area, if you want high performance you have to pay with high power, this is why ARM have the Big.Little Architecture if Cortex-A15 works few minutes it overheats so need fan or have to be switch off and Cortex-A7 to take over while the chip cool down.
There was good article about modern RISC / CISC evaluation which show that both architectures now behave about same.
Jun 01, 2014 @ 11:12:01
Olimex Olinuxino-KIWI with With Rockchip 4xX86 Atom core!!! = Windows, Android, Linux, FreeDOS, FreeBSD, HaikuOS, ArOS Amiga OS…
Jun 02, 2014 @ 19:48:42
If you make Olinuxino Kiwi, are you going to make a contest for the logo again? 🙂 An x86 Rockchip would be even more interesting than the latest Rockchip to me, since some closed source apps which I’m forced to use (though being an open source fan) exist only for x86. Anyway you put it, you have one more customer 🙂