Intel Quark is a 32-bit x86 System-on-a-Chip family from Intel , which was presented at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco in 2013 , which enables embedded and energy-saving applications such as wearable computing ( To address electronic circuits integrated in clothing and textiles. The chips are even smaller and more energy efficient than the Atom processors and are part of the Intel Galileo development board. The first product in the Quark family is the single-core X1000 SoC, which is manufactured using Intel's 32 nm process and clocked at up to 400 MHz. It also contains 512KB embedded- SRAM and DDR3 - memory controller . PCI Express , SPI, I²C , Fast Ethernet, USB 2.0, SDIO and GPIOs are implemented on peripheral elements.
Microarchitecture
The CPU of the Quark SoC was designed on the basis of the 80486 processor introduced by Intel in 1989 , whose five-stage pipeline was adopted. The instruction set corresponds to that of the classic P54C Pentium processor, i. H. without MMX, SSE and 64-bit extensions. However, the CPU includes some enhancements that Intel added to the original Pentium design (P54C) such as: B. the CPUID command and the System Management Mode (SMM). Unlike the standard cache of the 80486 , Quark has separate 16 kiB caches for commands and data. The CPU has no branch prediction . An optional x87 -compatible floating point unit supports the 32, 64 and 80-bit formats defined in the IEEE standard 754 and is binary compatible with the Intel 80387 coprocessor .
Energy saving modes and computing power
With C0, C1 and C2, Intel Quark implements a subset of the C energy saving modes known from the Atom processor . Regarding the power consumption there are no official data from Intel, that of the CPU core of the X1000 is estimated at 400 MHz at 0.07 to 0.09 W and that of the entire SoC at 1 W. The computing power of the Quark CPU is estimated at 2.3 Coremark / MHz, a similar value that the Cortex-A12 from ARM delivers. The outdated Dhrystone benchmark achieved 1.2 DMIPS / MHz, significantly more than the 80486 processor from 1989, which achieved 0.8 DMIPS / MHz.
