While Apple was busy hogging all the limelight with its iPhone event, Intel was having its yearly IDF also in San Francisco where it made a number of announcements. Amongst the all the announcements, perhaps the biggest news was related to the Quark chipset, which is meant for wearable computing devices like smartwatches.
According to Intel’s newly minted CEO Brian Krzanich the new Quark X1000 chipset is one-fifth the size of its existing Atom chipsets and uses just one-tenth the amount of power. He elaborated that Intel would provide reference boards and software to build into tiny computing devices like smartwatches.
Intel clarified that it will only build the underlying technology and will not itself build a smartwatch or a wearable computing device, unlike Qualcomm that unveiled its Toq smartwatch earlier this month. Notably, the Quark chipset is fully synthesizable, which means companies could just license Intel’s intellectual property and build custom solutions around it just like companies like Texas Instruments, Nvidia and Samsung utilise ARM’s technology for their processors.
The Quark chip comes from the newly formed new devices division in Intel which is being headed by Mike Bell who headed their mobile CPU division. Intel claims that Quark reference boards will begin sampling in Q4 only, so this mean new products based on Quark will not see the light of day till 2014.
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