Intel Discontinues Quark SoCs and Microcontrollers
by Anton Shilov on January 22, 2019 9:00 AM EST
Intel has announced that it will discontinue all of its Quark-series SoCs microcontrollers. Intel’s partners will have to make their final orders for the chips this summer, whereas the company will continue to fulfil Quark orders several years down the road.
Intel’s 32-bit Quark SoCs and microcontrollers are aimed at IoT applications, including wearables, smart home devices, industrial, and other. Intel’s customers will have to make their final Quark orders by July 19, 2019. Meanwhile, the manufacturer will keep shipping its Quarks till July 17, 2022, as makers of the said devices have very long product cycles and need time to develop and replace models use the processors.
Intel Galileo. Image by Adafruit.com
Intel introduced its Quark products in late 2013 along with its Galileo mainboard carrying a Quark microcontroller. Intel also launched its Quark-based Edison microcomputer, the Curie module featuring a Quark SE processor. By now, Intel has discontinued all of its Quark-powered products, including Galileo, Edison, Joule, and Curie. Meanwhile, the latter will still be available to interested parties until June 15, 2020.
Originally meant to power emerging mass market devices, Intel’s Quark SoCs and microcontrollers have barely become popular among makers of actual products. Therefore, it is not surprising that Intel discontinues the lineup without introducing any direct replacements.
The list of Quark products set to be discontinued includes the following SKUs:
- Intel Quark SoC X1020D
- Intel Quark SoC X1000
- Intel Quark SoC X1010
- Intel Quark SoC X1021D
- Intel Quark SoC X1001
- Intel Quark SoC X1011
- Intel Quark SoC X1020
- Intel Quark SoC X1021
- Intel Quark Microcontroller D1000
- Intel Quark Microcontroller D2000
- Intel Quark SE C1000 Microcontroller
- Intel Quark Microcontroller D2000
- Intel Quark SE C1000 Microcontroller
Related Reading
- Intel Announces “Quark” SoC Family: Tiny SoCs For Tiny Devices
- Intel Announces Galileo: Quark Based Arduino Compatible Developer Board
- IDF 2014: Intel Edison Development Platform Now Shipping
Source: Intel
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Thatguy97 - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
is this suprising or no?deil - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
nah.psychobriggsy - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
Not a big surprise, given the myriad of IoT ARM (and MIPS, an upcoming RISC-V) microcontrollers available on the market at every price point and capability already.Ikefu - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
The lack of documentation is what really killed the Quark MCUs. The Maker and R&D communities were excited about these when they first came out but quickly realized the documentation and support was just non-existent. Hard to program them when you can't even figure out which registers you need.Everyone needs to learn from the Raspberry Pi. Its not the fastest but its by far the most well documented and that trumps just about everything else. A Ferrari's not going anywhere without the key! Even a scooter will beat it off the line in that case.
close - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
This. Plenty of faster alternatives for the Pi but having an active development community around it makes Pi the obvious choice most times. And an active community needs active support from the manufacturer's side. An area in which Intel was always lacking.HStewart - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
Are you really serious about active support - maybe not from hacker community like Pi and Adreno, but all notebook manufactures for Windows PC and also Apple.Pi is good to learn embedded system - but I know of no profession product that use Pi
PeachNCream - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
I have seen several companies installing RPi boards inside of thin clients or zero clients for remote access. If you scrounge around the Internet you'll see them. Despite that, I agree that the Pi is generally not a commercial product nor was it initially intended for such uses.HStewart - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
My guess is that some one at Intel thought they could get into market of such devices and decided lack of use by people was not worth the effort. And decided to focus on commercial products.What is interesting, is that Quark D2000 is listed on Intel Ark site as still available
https://ark.intel.com/products/91947/Intel-Quark-M...
Ikefu - Wednesday, January 23, 2019 - link
Intel has active support for Core CPUs, not for Quark MCUs or any other side project of theirs. The point of the Pi is that it was widely adopted by its target audience because of the documentation. Whatever the target market the lack of docs killed the Quark. Broadcom sells lots of SoCs for products because the docs for the RPi still apply when used on a custom circuit board. That's millions of units moved due to good documentation.HStewart - Tuesday, January 22, 2019 - link
I think this is actually Intel getting rid of some of fat - possibly they a better solution in the future.