Intel Wants Part of The Internet of Things (IoT)
For most people Intel is associated with the slogan, “Intel Inside” which is used as a common badge for a standard desktop or laptop PC. But Intel’s technology is used in many other things such as those for IoT solutions. The latter part of 2015 saw a lot of announcements from Intel giving glimpses of the vision they have for IoT in the home and industries.
Intel has made capital investments, in the hundreds of millions; created strategic partnerships and released new technical solutions for the IoT market.
Through its investment vehicle, Intel Capital, Intel recently made an additional investment in Sckipio, a technology company. This was to further the development of the G.fast digital subscriber line (DSL) standard. Through Intel’s connected home division both companies have been working on G.fast technologies. In 2014 they announced the first G.fast reference design for residential gateways.
The work that Intel is doing may have been the reason behind it acquisition of Lantiq, which Intel said was to enables them to extend their cable home gateways solutions into the DSL and fibre markets.
Cable companies have invested huge sums in setting up entire copper infrastructure, which was great ten years ago for the services available then. They are now under pressure to offer faster speed or to replace copper with fibre. The use of G.fast technology is to allow broadband providers to offer faster broadband speed over existing copper cables.
With the release of the Intel Quark SE SoC (system on chip) and Intel Quark D1000 and D2000, which are supported by the free Wind River’s cloud-connected Operating System (OS); Intel said they are making it easier for solutions provider to scale their platform to the cloud.
The Quark processors for IoT, provides low-power silicon for smart-things; they offer powerful processor power and are still energy efficient; pattern matching technology to deliver real-time insight from complex sensor data. Because of these features, they are an ideal package for IoT solutions, said Intel.
To allow greater insight into the data gathered by smart devices, there is the Trusted Analytics Platform (TAP). The solution integrates into Intel’s IoT platform to help make the data gathered actionable and can be integrated in an end-to-end IoT solution. According to Intel, TAP was designed for developers and data scientists, making an ideal solution for industries such as healthcare, retail and Industrial.