Intel Launches Galileo Arduino Compatible Board With New Quark X1000 SoC

Although Intel is Chipzilla, the company can’t help but extend its reach just a bit into the exciting and growing world of DIY makers and hobbyists. Intel announced its Galileo development board, a microcontroller that’s compatible with Arduino software and uses the new Quark X1000 SoC processor (400MHz, 32-bit, Pentium-class, single- core and thread) that Intel announced at the IDF 2013 keynote.

The board makes use of Intel’s architecture to make it easy to develop for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but it’s also completely open hardware. If this sounds similar to the low-cost Raspberry Pi board, that’s because they’re definitely of the same ilk.

Intel Galileo development board with Quark SoC

Galileo is just 10cm x 7cm (although ports protrude a bit beyond that), and there are four screw holes for secure mounting. Ports include 10/100 Ethernet, USB client/host ports, RS-232 UART and 3.5mm jack, mini PCIe slot (with USB 2.0 host support); other features include 8MB Legacy SPI Flash for firmware storage, 512KB embedded SRAM, 256MB DRAM, 11KB EEPROM programmed via the EEPROM library, and support for an additional 32GB of storage using a microSD card.



Intel didn’t announce pricing for Galileo, but the company is running a program for universities where it will give away 50,000 of the boards to over 1,000 universities over the course of the next year and a half. We imagine that throngs of innovative young minds will find a thing or two to do with Galileo and all the creative endeavors it enables.