Intel was always in the front line from long time, discovering and adopting the best cutting edge technologies to shape the future. Now, the “thinking big” became also “thinking big for the makers”! With Arduino, it realized a new amazing board, the Galileo
The board is based on Intel Quark SoC X1000 Application Processor, a 32-bit Intel Pentium-class system on a chip, but is designed to be hardware and software compatible with Arduino shields (the ones compatible with Arduino Uno R3), thus each pin in the header (you can notice it on the top view) is positioned exactly like an Arduino Uno R3, also known as Arduino 1.0 pinout. Since the board is provided with a voltage translator, it can work either with 3.3V and 5V shields!
The Galileo board has several PC industry standard I/O ports and features to expand native usage and capabilities of Arduino, all come as a standard on the board
- A full sized mini-PCI Express slot
- 100Mb Ethernet port
- Micro-SD slot
- RS-232 serial port
- USB Host port
- USB Client port
- 8MByte NOR flash
Let’s take a look at the much more clear block diagram
The core is obvious the X-1000 SoC that has impressive characteristics
- 400MHz 32-bit Intel Pentium ISA compatible processor
- 16 KByte L1 cache
- 512 KBytes of on-die embedded SRAM
- Simple to program: Single thread, single core, constant speed
- ACPI compatible CPU sleep states supported
- An integrated Real Time Clock (RTC)
Briefly, it has all requisites to become the new reference for makers in need of more computing power for their projects, with the ease of Arduino environment. This because the Galileo can be programmed with the Arduino software!
Intel has started a free distribution of more then 50000 sample board across 1000 universities in the world, I hope to provide soon an hands-on 😉
If you need more info, take a look here