This is exactly the type of marketing effort Intel needs in order to steal the embedded systems market back from ARM. As an embedded systems hacker who normally works on projects with budgets well under $10m, Intel has never really been on my radar. They're incredibly unapproachable until you're a bigger OEM, and chances are if you've started from scratch you're already used to (and tooled for) designing for ARM.
Creating an open platform around Atom makes Intel much, much more approachable.
With regard to price, I'm not discouraged at all. $200 is well within my personal budget, and I've got a vision-heavy robotics project in mind that I'd love to use this for.
Why not use an Raspberry Pi or a more powerful ARMv7 SBC? ARM software support is getting better every day, but the vast, vast majority of software is still written for x86. As examples, libBLAS, LAPACK, libav, OpenCV - all of these were written and optimized for x86 MMX, then SSE*, first. Their performance on ARMv7 has come a long way very quickly, but ARM performance is a secondary goal for a lot of these types of projects.
Shit, how well does Matlab or Octave run on ARM? I know more than a few people who'd salivate at the chance to write sensing/control code in Octave and run it on a $200 SBC...
Creating an open platform around Atom makes Intel much, much more approachable.
With regard to price, I'm not discouraged at all. $200 is well within my personal budget, and I've got a vision-heavy robotics project in mind that I'd love to use this for.
Why not use an Raspberry Pi or a more powerful ARMv7 SBC? ARM software support is getting better every day, but the vast, vast majority of software is still written for x86. As examples, libBLAS, LAPACK, libav, OpenCV - all of these were written and optimized for x86 MMX, then SSE*, first. Their performance on ARMv7 has come a long way very quickly, but ARM performance is a secondary goal for a lot of these types of projects.
Shit, how well does Matlab or Octave run on ARM? I know more than a few people who'd salivate at the chance to write sensing/control code in Octave and run it on a $200 SBC...