Intel Begins to Lay Out Its Road Map for the Internet of Things

By Jeffrey Burt

Ton Steenman, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Intelligent Systems Group, said the chip maker’s IoT plans will accelerate the market and open it up to more businesses. “Intel has the vision to democratize the benefits of the Internet of things,” he said.

Intel’s Steenman holds up a Quark X1000 SoC, the first of a new family of chips aimed at such markets as wearable devices and the Internet of things.

The Quark SoCs are a fifth the size of Atom chips and consume a tenth of the power. The 32-bit X1000, based on the Pentium instruction set, will have ECC and integrated security and can be used in everything from temperature-control units for buildings to power grids.

Steenman shows off the Atom E3800 SoC, which also offers integrated security and ECC memory, as well as improved media and graphics performance.

Intel officials see the new family of Atom chips being used in such areas as digital signage, interactive kiosks, intelligent vending, ATMs, point-of-sale terminals, portable medical devices and in-vehicle infotainment systems.

Greg Brown, chief technology officer of cloud and data center solutions for McAfee, explains how the security software will be used in a new family of intelligent gateways designed to connect existing legacy systems to each other and the cloud.

Wind River’s Intelligent Design Platform will be integrated into the gateways, according to Jim Douglas, chief marketing officer for Wind River. The first of the gateway solutions will start appearing in the first quarter of 2014, Steenman said.

The massive air conditioning, heating, ventilation and refrigeration company is leveraging the gateway solutions to connect its existing Rebel rooftop units and bring data to the cloud, according to Kevin Facinelli, executive vice president at Daikin Applied. The data is collected and analyzed, and then leveraged to make the systems work more efficiently.