Intel’s Shot At Dominating the IoT: The Compute Card
Intel is positioning itself to try set the standard format for the Internet of Things. In August its Compute Card, a full computer in a credit-card sized format, will ship.
The Compute Card is more than just a small format computer, it is Intel’s play for dominance in the largest computing market that will ever exist.
Conservative estimates of the number of ‘things’ now linked online run to 15 billion or more. Compare that to just three-plus billion mobile phones in service world wide. For a chip maker like Intel, the IoT is increasingly the main game, while phones and traditional computing formats, desk, laptop, tablets, are good markets, but there is fierce competition and margins are slim.
As in many other tech markets in recent decades, the company that sets the format wins most of the revenue streams for many years to come. We’ve seen it numerous times: Betamax v VHS, iPods v the Walkman, Apple v Microsoft, My Space v Facebook, Google v Bing and Yahoo, and so on. One format wins, the second and third may survive, but their market share is constantly under pressure and revenues poor.
The Compute Card appears to have everything needed to become a dominant format — a standard for the IoT industry. It will be super-easy to install and remove, small and unobtrusive. The first specs configure it just like a PC without the peripherals: state of the art core processors, solid state hard drives and reasonable RAM. All the usual comms systems, wi fi, Bluetooth, etc. will be built in.
Although not locked in prices are likely to range from 300–450 USD per unit.
Generous computing power in a tiny form factor, ready to be plugged into absolutely anything, means the hardware for computing ‘intelligence’ can now be installed in virtually any product or structure easily and at limited cost.
Designers of everything from cars to aeroplanes, buildings to power plants and virtually anything imaginable in-between, can now install sufficient hardware for whatever computing power they need without worrying about sourcing and creating bespoke systems.
On the manufacturing and supply side this will mean shorter and cheaper design and product development times. For the operators and maintainers of equipment it means most maintenance will migrate to software controls and hardware failures will be ‘solved’ by the simple expedient of removing and throwing out the malfunctioning card and installing another one.
The Compute Card will even compete in laptops and PCs. Why dispose of a perfectly good screen and keyboard because of an upgrade or a failure in the guts of the computer? Simply pop the card out and install a new upgraded card. Laptops with Compute Card slots are already planned.
The implications for the complexity of the IoT are, if anything, even more profound. The Compute Card will provide previously unavailable levels of computing power to designers who can simply add slots at various points in the machine or structure designs. At present we are building numerous large data centres to provide the computing muscle needed for the cloud. Now, a much larger proportion of that computing muscle is going to be dispersed throughout the net.
The size of that muscle will be indefinable, as it will continuously grow. The IoT is just an infant now, but the onset of puberty is within sight.
The complexity of the overall system, or systems, which make up the IoT, is about to explode, as are the number of enabling technologies and the industries built thereon. Big data opportunities, AI applications and other technologies will proliferate as demand soars.
The overall market for Compute Cards, if Intel is successful in setting the format standard, will run to the tens of billions very quickly. It is a play that could put Intel right on top of the tech hardware ladder — right up there with Facebook, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Andy Gove would be proud.
But, what happens the Compute Card flops? For Intel it would be back to the drawing board to develop another shot at the grail. But, for the development of the IoT and its attendant technologies and industries, it would only mean things are delayed a little. A standard format is on its way, one way or the other. At the moment, Itel’s Compute Card looks like a contender.
