Intel Quark

Intel Quark is a 32 -bit x86 system -on-a - chip family of Intel, which was presented in 2013 at the developer conference IDF in San Francisco, and embedded and power-saving applications such as wearable electronics (integrated in clothing and textiles electronic circuits ) should be addressed. The chips are smaller and more energy efficient than the Atom processors and are part of the Intel Galileo development boards. The first product of the quark family is the single-core X1000 SoC, which is manufactured in Intel's 32 -nm process and clocked at up to 400 MHz. It also contains 512 kB embedded SRAM and a DDR3 memory controller. At peripheral elements are PCI Express, SPI, I ² C, Fast Ethernet, USB 2.0, SDIO and GPIOs implemented ..

Microarchitecture

The CPU of the quark- SoC was designed on the basis of 1989 presented by Intel 80486 processor, the 5 - stage pipeline has been adopted. However, the instruction set is similar to the Pentium processor without MMX, SSE and 64 -bit extensions. However, the CPU contains some extensions that Intel has added to the original Pentium design ( P54C ), such as the CPUID instruction and the System Management Mode (SMM ). Unlike the default cache 80486 includes separate curd, 16 kb caches for instructions and data. The CPU has no branch prediction. An optional x87 -compatible floating point support as defined by the IEEE - 754 standard 32 -, 64 - and 80 - bit formats and is binary compatible with the 8087 coprocessor, 80287 and 80387th

Energy saving and processing power

Intel Quark implemented with C0, C1 and C2 is a subset of familiar from the Atom processor C- power modes. In terms of power, there is no official information from Intel that the CPU cores from the X1000 is estimated at 400 MHz to 70-90 mW and that of the entire SoCs to 1W. The computing power of the quark- CPU is estimated at 2.3 Coremark / MHz, a similar value that the Cortex- A12 ARM supplies. When obsolete Dhrystone benchmark 1.2 DMIPS / MHz are obtained, significantly more than the 80486 of 1989, which came to 0.8 DMIPS / MHz.