Intel Quark

Intel Quark is a line of 32-bit x86 SoCs and μCs by Intel, designed for small size and low power consumption, and targeted at new markets including wearable devices. The line was introduced at Intel Developer Forum in 2013. Quark processors, while slower than Atom processors, are much smaller and consume less power. They lack support for SIMD instruction sets (such as MMX and SSE) and only support embedded operating systems. Quark powers the Intel Galileo developer microcontroller board. The CPU instruction set is the same as a Pentium (P54C/i586) CPU.

Contents

• Lakemont 32 nm
• Clanton
• Segfault bug
• References

The first product in the Quark line is the single-core 32 nm X1000 SoC with a clock rate of up to 400 MHz. The system includes several interfaces, including PCI Express, serial UART, I²C, Fast Ethernet, USB 2.0, SDIO, power management controller, and GPIO. There are 16 KB of on-chip embedded SRAM and an integrated DDR3 memory controller.

A second Intel product that includes Quark core, the Intel Edison microcomputer, was presented in January 2014. It has a form factor close to the size of an SD card, and is capable of wireless networking using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

In January 2015, Intel announced the sub-miniature Intel Curie module for wearable applications, based on a Quark SE core with 80 KB SRAM and 384 KB flash. At the size of a button, it also features a 6-axis accelerometer, a DSP sensor hub, a Bluetooth LE unit and a battery charge controller.

In October 2015, Intel's Senior Vice President Josh Walden and Arduino LLC's Massimo Banzi announced the successor to the "Arduino Uno" would be the "Arduino 101" and that it would be based on Intel's Curie module which itself was centered on a Quark processor.