IDF 2014: Intel talks wearables and launches Edison

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If you read our earlier coverage of IDF 2014, you saw that Intel CEO Brian Krzanich predicted that there will be about 50 billion connected devices by the year 2020.

The strangest part of the prediction? Not all of them will be made by major manufacturers. Some of them will be made by people like you and me - well, people like us with a little programming knowledge.

Intel is prepared to meet Maker's demands by launching Edison, an all-in-one development board that is on the border of rivaling some full-scale systems.

Makers faire

The mini computer, unveiled at CES in January, will pack a 22nm Intel Atom dual-core System-on-Chip (SoC) clocked at 500MHz as well as a 32-bit Intel Quark processor MCU at 100 MHz and come with 1GB LPDDR3 POP memory, 4GB eMMC Storage and support dual-band Broadcom 43340 802.11 a/b/g/n Wifi and Bluetooth 4.0.

For all intents and purposes this is an x86 system. It should be able to run most Linux distributions quite comfortably and leave the maker with more than enough room on the chip for a fair bit of code.

The code can either be uploaded via a device-to-device connection (read: USB) or download the aforementioned script from the cloud.

Portables panel

Edison was the primary focus of a panel Tuesday entitled "The Next Revolution in Computing: Edison, Wearable's [sic] and New Devices," lead by Mike Bell, vice president at Intel of the company's New Devices Group.

Bell talked at length about how Intel is giving developers and makers more power than ever. The possibilities shown during the panel included a drone demo with person-tracking technology before shifting its focus to the company's latest wearable, the Mica.

The Mica, along with the SMS Headphones and Basis Watch, represent Intel's growing interest in the wearable space. But just what, if anything, the company thinks of Apple's new Watch is anyone's guess.

The Edison is available starting today and example projects can be found on Intel's website.

• Edison isn't the only cool device to come out of IDF2014! Read the rest of our coverage!