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rbanffy 3 days ago

I miss Intel's Quark chips. Tiny, cheap, and Pentium enough.

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watersb 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I found 10 Intel Galileo dev kits, new in box, left at our local recycling center on the "Free: Take Me Home" shelf.

And just today, I received the Intel Edison dev kit that I'd purchased on eBay.

The Galileo is a Quark X1000 SoC, two P54C cores. In-order, original 32-bit Pentium.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Galileo

The Edison is a modern System On Module about the size of an SD card but about 3x the thickness of one. It's far more capable: dual 64-bit Silvermont Atom cores, Super scalar out of order. And an additional Quark core as a system monitor, running an independent RTOS. There's also 4GB eMMC, 1GB RAM, WiFi, and Bluetooth on the module. Its quite a remarkable curiosity.

Ten years ago, Intel tried to catch up to ARM in tablets and smartphones, but it was already too late, and this entire segment of Intel was cancelled within a year or two.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Edison

Next up is building more recent Linux images for these via the Yocto Project and the now cancelled Intel Board Support Packages (BSP).

If you like low power tiny systems, there's a strange amount of fun to be had.

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rbanffy 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I found 10 Intel Galileo dev kits, new in box, left at our local recycling center on the "Free: Take Me Home" shelf.

Looks like an opportunity for a cluster in a picture frame. Did you get them?

I have one, a 4 RPI Zero W cluster in an Ikea picture frame:

https://x.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/1163378341610688513

	▲	watersb 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Looks like an opportunity for a cluster in a picture frame. Did you get them? Are you kidding? Of course I got them! :-) It was actually better than that: they were in bulk boxes of five, there were at least eight such boxes. I took two, just to have one to play with and to get them out of the elements (they were on shelf that's partially protected on one side by a metal storage shed, but the shelf is just standing outdoors).. I stopped by the local makerspace a day or two later, to let them know. I don't know what became of them. My boxes got shoved to the back of the project queue and it's been about a year now. I just got them out about a week ago, looking into building the new firmware images. These Intel Galileo dev kits are quite a bit bigger than a typical Arduino. They have the standard dual row inline headers of an Arduino (I think its pin-compatible), but lots more IO. There's Ethernet, for instance. Nearly the size of a Pico-ITX form factor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pico-ITX

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userbinator 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Those were actually a 486 microarchitecture with some Pentium instructions added. If you look at the documentation for them, it's obvious that they copy-pasted the 486's and search-and-replaced.

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toast0 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Didn't they have the F00F bug? (Thanks, I keep misremembering) How much more Pentium do you want?

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oakwhiz 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

No, the Quarks did not have the f00f bug, that would have been funny though.

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numpad0 3 days ago | parent [-]

Didn't they have issues with `LOCK CMPXCHG`(not the 8B)? This is out of my depth and I am not sure, but it sounds similar to the f00f bug.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark#Segfault_bug

	▲	neerajsi 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, they did have the bug with the lock prefix. IOT people at Microsoft got NT booting on the Quark and we ran into that problem. I wound up writing a small tool to patch out all the lock prefixes.

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accrual 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I believe the F00F bug was patched out pretty quickly in the Pentium's B2 stepping. Nevertheless, some OSs still have mitigations if they detect an affected CPU (e.g. OpenBSD).

	▲	epcoa 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It wasn’t even discovered until 1997, so no that wasn’t exactly early in the Pentium lifecycle at all. There were multiple models and millions of devices affected.