Although not officially launched, the family of MCUs will put Intel firmly in the picture for low cost, low power MCUs needed to empower the billions of IoT nodes expected to be developed and deployed over the next five years. The fact that the family of products will be based on the same x86 instruction set remains to be proved to be the right move, however.
Principal Analyst for Semicast Research, Colin Barnden, commented recently that he expected Intel to buy Freescale but since the NXP merger he now believes Intel needs to ‘finish what it started’ with the Atom and Quark, to develop a range of x86-based MCUs. He added: “If Intel is serious about IoT, it has to establish a presence somewhere in the $1-5 32-bit MCU segment, and soon.” It now appears Intel has been developing just such a range of MCUs and is poised to go public with details.