At the Makers Faire conference in Rome Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich announced an alliance with the makers of Arduino to gain a toehold in the growing hardware hacker community currently dominated by ARM or Atmel-powered platforms.

 

The Galileo uses a 400MHz Intel Quark X1000 system-on-a-chip processor (released in September) with a Pentium-based instruction set. It is compatible with the Arduino Software Development Environment running on Macs, Windows PCs or Linux machines.

 

The board measures 4.2 x 2.8″ with two rows of pin sockets for (3.3 or 5 V) Arduino shields. Connectors provide USB (host and client), 100Mbps Ethernet, RS-232, and a full-size mini-PCI Express slot, but no display output. GPIOs are provided via an I2C expander chip.

For storage, there’s 8MB of Flash for bootloader code and Arduino sketches, plus a Micro SD port for up to 32GB of extra storage. It also has 512KB of embedded SRAM and 256MB of DRAM.

 

To facilitate market uptake Intel are gifting 50,000 Galileos to universities around the world, home brewers can get it for $60 or less by late November. Intel promises full compatibility with Arduino software and hardware.