Intel Quark-socs get integrated GPU and Windows support in 2016

Intel will come in 2015 with the successor to the economical Quark X1000 soc. This generation will be called Liffy Island and it will be succeeded by Seal Beach in 2016. The latter socs will be the first to include an integrated video chip and be able to run Windows.

The main improvements that Seal Beach will receive in 2016 over previous Quark socs are improved performance, support for Windows, an integrated GPU, support for the sse2 instruction set and the hardware acceleration of encryption. The gpu can display 3d graphics and gets an mpeg2 decoder. The connection to screens is via dsi and lvds. The Seal Beach socks may also receive support for touchscreens.

Seal Beach will also be a slightly faster variant of predecessor Liffy Island, which will appear next year. The Liffy Islands soc, like the current Quark X1000 soc, is a 32-bit soc with a single x86 core without support for HyperThreading. However, relative to the X1000, the clock speed is increased from 400MHz to 533MHz and the amount of L1 cache increases from 16KB to 64KB. In addition, there will be support for ddr3l-1066, where the X1000 supports a maximum of ddr3-800.

The amount of embedded sram is doubled from 512 kilobytes to 1MB. As for input/output, the 10/100 Ethernet interfaces have been replaced by gigabit variants and support for high speed uart is introduced. The tdp will be about 2W, but there will also be versions with a tdp of 1.2W.

The slides come from the Myce site, which previously published authentic Intel slides. The Quark socs are for internet-of-things applications and Intel uses them for the Edison mini computers as well.