Intel’s $50 Edison chip coming to India in 2014

On Tuesday at IDF, Intel announced that it has started the global shipping of its $50 Edison chip for wearable devices and Internet of Things products. In addition to this on the sidelines of the event, Intel executives confirmed that the chipset would be coming to India by November, 2014.

Edward Ross, senior director for Intel’s new devices and wearable computing group claimed that India would be a big market for the Edison chip and was currently undergoing the certification process in India. “The certification process should get completed by the end of October and we should be ready to launch in November,” he said.

He also said that Edison will be available in 65 countries by the end of 2014. The Edison chip has been built on Intel’s quark platform and has been designed to facilitate new kind of hardware and also wearables.

Ross also claimed that currently Intel is focussing on getting the Edison chip in the hands of the DIY community and tinkerers so that they create new type of hardware based on Edison and Galileo. It is currently not focussing on shrinking the size of the die, something the company obsesses over.

According to Ross, India will be a key market for Edison as it has a vibrant coder and DIY community.

At IDF, Intel showed off many examples of Edison powering a range of new type of hardware. This also included a robotic spider, which was built by an enthusiast, though it was clearly a prototype and nowhere near being a final product.

Besides the Edison, Intel showed off expansion boards for the chip.

Apart from Edison, Intel announced its next generation 14nm (nanometer) architecture, which will be called Skylake and it showed off products based on its Mooresfield chip including the Dell Venue 8 7000 Android tablet, which is according to Dell is the slimmest tablet in the world at 6mm of thickness.