The rollout is the latest in the microprocessor chip giant's high-stakes bet to carve out an early lead in the competition for fast-growing IoT markets, as consumers and enterprises are jumping on the IoT bandwagon to have their homes, stores, factories, and even logistics and supply chain management systems stay connected with the Internet around the clock.
Based on Intel's Quark CPU processors and Wind River's cloud-based OS software, the new platform is to power a variety of IoT devices and systems.
The Quark CPU processors - Quark microcontroller D1000, Intel Quark microcontroller D2000, and Intel Quark SE microcontrollers - are a series of CPU processors purely dedicated to run on IoT devices, featuring flexible, low-power computing for a wide variety of small form factor applications.
The Quark processor family are scalable enough to power a wide range of devices depending on applications, operating at a wide range of temperatures from -40 °C to +85 °C - ideal for small form factor IoT applications.
Intel has also rolled out a reference design platform based the Quark processor family and Wind River OS platform to help IoT device makers to easily build their system and devices.
"Today, Intel further solidifies its position in the IoT and continues to deliver a comprehensive set of building blocks with a strong ecosystem to address the IoT opportunity," said Doug Davis, senior vice president, IoT Group at Intel. "Intel is making it easier for our customers to scale from things to cloud with new Intel Quark processors for IoT and Wind River's free cloud-connected OS for microcontrollers."
The platform is the second of Intel's IoT platform series, following that was optimized with Google's Brillo OS, a purely dedicated OS for IoT devices
Intel is working with a variety of companies across market segments to scale from a proof of concept to pilot to deployments.Levi Strauss & Co.* collaborated with Intel and implemented a proof of concept for the Intel IoT Platform to address inventory management in three of its stores. The proof of concept allows the Levi's stores to gain visibility into what's on the shelf or what might be running low, making the process of inventory management more effective, so when the consumer comes in looking for that exact size and color jeans, it's on the shelf.
IoT made easy
The new Intel IoT Platform reference architecture for smart and connected things is focused on enabling the broad Intel ecosystem to simply develop, secure and integrate smart things. The platform provides a blueprint for delivering innovations to market faster by reducing complexity and defining how smart devices will securely connect and share trusted data to the cloud.
For example, SAP is the first company to build its IoT solutions around the new Intel IoT platform utilizing its SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
The Intel Quark SE SoC and the Intel® Quark™ microcontroller D1000 and D2000 feature powerful processing in an energy-conscious envelope.
The Intel Quark SE SoC for IoT offers an integrated sensor hub as well as pattern matching technology to deliver real-time insights from complex sensor data at the very edge of IoT.
A case in point is Yanzi, a smart building provider who has built its Yanzi Plug and Motion monitoring sensor network around Intel Quark SoC to collect data on everything from space utilization to lighting usage in an office building.
The Yanzi Plug is an energy monitoring sensor that enables optimized energy use based on space utilization and predictive maintenance in smart buildings, in addition to providing analytics at the edge and in the "thing."
Honeywell demonstrated a prototype of its connected worker solution featuring Intel Quark technology.
The industrial wearable helps monitor the environments of mission-critical workers like first responders, industrial workers and firefighters. It demonstrates how the integration of data from multiple workers can anticipate unsafe conditions and prevent potential "man-down" scenarios or equipment failures that could threaten worker safety and cause costly downtime.
Child Angel’s* advanced location device, powered by Intel Quark technology and using the Intel® XMM™ 6255 modem, extends intelligence to a wearable on a child’s wrist, allowing them more freedom while providing an extra layer of care with location and biometric sensing and real-time analytics.
The Intel Quark microcontroller D1000 has fine-grained power management features that enable battery-powered and line-powered sensors to provide secure, intelligent processing for wired and wireless real world applications at the edge.
The Intel Quark D2000 microcontroller includes powerful processing in an energy-conscious envelope, offering developers a platform to build devices on the edge that are fully compatible with other Intel products. Additionally, solutions providers can deploy compatible software throughout the solution to tie different pieces together.
Intel Quark microcontrollers D2000 and SE feature a full Intel x86 instruction set architecture for compatibility and scalability, offering low-power performance that can be scaled throughout a solution for end-to-end deployments.
The Intel Quark microcontroller D1000 is available today, while the Intel Quark microcontroller D2000 will be available by the end of this year. The Intel Quark SE SoC for IoT will be available in the first half of 2016.
Free software from things to cloud
The new OS offering from Wind River is designed to help makers and commercial developers simplify and accelerate IoT application and device development, with the ability to start building applications in 10 minutes. A critical part of the Intel IoT Platform, it includes free cloud-connected multi-architecture operating systems, Wind River Rocket and Wind River Pulsar Linux, and a comprehensive cloud suite of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products.
From makers to commercial developers, the "things to cloud" solution opens IoT device development to a wide range of individuals who want to participate in the IoT opportunity. It also offers customers a path to commercialization – from experimentation to development to full commercial deployments. With its latest offering, Wind River not only grows its presence in the cloud, but further extends its OS footprint to MCUs.
Unleashing the value of IoT with analytics
Another key ingredient to the new Intel IoT Platform is the Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP), which helps make data actionable and can be integrated in an end-to-end IoT solution.
Designed for developers and data scientists, TAP is the ideal platform for a range of industries such as healthcare, retail and industrial. It integrates with the Intel IoT Platform reference architecture for data management, protocol abstraction, workload distribution and compute.
Levi Strauss & Co. can now use TAP to gain near real-time inventory insights that help improve accuracy in data collection to deliver an enhanced in-store experience to shoppers. Honeywell is using TAP in its connected worker solution for industrial safety to improve real-time decision-making.
