Intel powers an Arduino

Intel powers an Arduino

Posted Oct 6, 2013 17:39 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Intel powers an Arduino by marcH
Parent article: Intel powers an Arduino for the first time with new “Galileo” board (ars technica)

In SoCs like Quark, the *entire* CPU core is small compared to the rest of the SoC anyway.

That's true for most SoCs, but I doubt it's true for Quark. Quark is billed as ⅕ of Atom. Atom has about 50 million transistors thus Quark should have about 10 million. If you'll recall that even original Pentium had 3.1 million and also consider the fact that Quark is supposed to be synthesizable we should expect between 3 and 5 million transistors just for that single core. That's hardly small compared to the rest of the SoC anyway.

P.S. Of course Intel could have used 80486 core which only had ~1.2 million transistors but in that case it's 400MHz will deliver pretty pitiful performance by today's standards thus I hope it's at least Pentium-class CPU. And even in that case it'll be ⅒ of the whole SoC!

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