Intel's site is clearly not designed as regular microcontroller's site. You have to jump through like 4-5 pages to get a PDF (which they first open inside the page!). Also, their site is broken on Firefox, I had to use Chrome. Anyway knowing Intel I'm glad it's not under NDA.
From my initial investigation, they have 4 series:
- Quark SoC X1000
- Quark D1000
- Quark D2000
- Quark SE C1000
The X1000 is a SoC and actually a 400MHz computer. These chips should compete with the PIC32MZ (although it is a bit slower in processing power) and Cortex m7 chips, probably running some kind of embedded linux. Problem: they cost 50 euros each instead of the usual ~20euro BOM for a complete embedded computer. Upside: they are a small board you solder onto your product, which can make 50 euro seem cheap.
The D1000 seems like a cortex m0+ competitor with an proprietary/unknown CPU and complicated memory architecture (like 4 different memory regions for a small chip).
It has a 12-bit ADC. No DAC.
Only 2 timers, no PWM or capture to speak of.
Only 1 SPI master and 1 SPI slave.
Only 1 I2C.
2 UARTs
Sleep current down to 1.5uA which seems OK, wake up time 2.0us which seems OK. Voltage range down to 1.62V which seems low enough for direct battery operation.
The D2000 is more of the same. Again like like 4 different memory regions for such a simple device, same amount of peripherals but this time with 2 DMA channels, and a whopping 2 PWM channels. Don't known about capture pins.
Both of these series lack USB, ethernet, CAN.
All in all I think feature wise it's under offerings of competitor cortex m0+'s or the simplest PIC32s, and then you also have to go through much trouble to use them:
1) If you're already in the ARM or PIC regime, you have the toolchain, the debug cables and tools at hand. You probably need yet another Intel cable or devboard.
2) Chips available through limited set of suppliers, of which only Mouser is most accessible by most of us.
3) The chips are not particularly cheap. 4.21 euro in 1 qty? And still 2.73 euro in 4000 quantity? Go look up what that can buy you in ARM land. Much more, like STM32F3 series.
4) Upgrade paths? Little. If you outgrown a small m0+ or PIC32 you can upgrade to a bigger chip. With this you're stuck, need to change platforms, port all your peripheral code, etc.
Intel only offers the C1000 which is a much different beast. 32MHz x86 chip that does have a nicer amount of peripherals - like USB - but comes in a 144 pin BGA and costs 11 euro each in quantity (Ouch).
Not sure why anyone would use that, aside from the x86 selling point. The x1000 would seem most interesting to me.. basically an embedded x86 system with PCI-e 2.0 and DDR3.
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