Intel Debuts PC The Size Of SD Card

January 7, 2014 by Dave Haynes

Intel has announced its Edison development board – what amounts to a Pentium PC the size of an SD card. The Edison board has a low-power 400MHz Intel Quark processor with two cores, integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. 

This is not something you will trot down to your local Best Buy to grab for $49 or something. It’s a development board for manufacturers and software companies. It’s designed to run Linux.

Someone will, inevitably, get a digital signage application running on it. But to what end, I don’t know. It almost certainly won’t cost less than a Raspberry Pi and won’t have the graphics capabilities.

What’s instead interesting is how Edison-equipped devices could feed information into a more sophisticated platform. This is part of Intel’s Internet Of Things play, and you could have teeny computing devices associated with and providing data and images and analytics. Think of signage at a theme park on a busy day, and how multiple sensors and PC-equipped cameras could start to feed information to inform and direct people about entry and attraction line-ups.

It’s more than small enough to be wearable, or be installed on anything from a car or truck to anything else with a battery or AC power.