Taiwan’s IAdea has announced a new hardware platform that intriguingly makes it possible to run an Android digital signage application on conventional Intel x86 architecture, instead of the ARM-0based CPUs that have been used to date for Android products.
The platform was demonstrated today, with Intel, at the Digital Signage Shanghai Show.
IAdea suggests this new set-up will allow many digital signage content management system (CMS) vendors to quickly extend their Windows-based software to Android. The platform extends the SMIL+HTML5 open standards has had available in recent years,
IAdea’s implementation, says a news release, includes a modified Android system kernel to compensate for stability problems often found in the standard Android open source project. As a result, it is one of the most popular platform choice and has been used in several multi-thousand-unit retail deployments.
“This solution answers a huge need from the Android community. While ARM-based CPUs provide a low-cost alternative, they have not always delivered the performance expected of digital signage hardware,” said Rex Chen, Executive Vice President of IAdea. “We are pleased to be a part of Intel’s effort to embrace Android for retail applications. IAdea will soon enable our large number of CMS and OEM partners to take advantage of Intel’s latest silicon.”
Intel Reference Design for Digital Signage (EL-10) enables the first Intel x86 implementation of IAdea’s middleware. Used in conjunction with the robust middleware, the Intel architecture may provide superior performance at a given price point. Following IAdea’s announcement, dozens of CMS’s supporting the SMIL+HTML5 platform will soon be able to take advantage of Intel’s new hardware.
I asked John Wang, who runs IAdea, what’s up and how this will shake out.
Wang says the new Intel platform EL-10 (code named “Scorpion Ridge”) is similar to Intel’s little NUC devices, but will be based on the Atom family, starting with the Bay Trail chipset.
“Once IAdea ports the SMIL+HTML5 platform over to EL-10,” says Wang, “all software partners of IAdea (a dozen or so as listed on IAdea website, Scala, Signagelive, and the like) will run on the new Intel hardware, without incurring the ‘Windows tax.’ That removes a big roadblock for Intel in the entry-level market.”
The first EL-10 hardware will come from Gigabyte. Prices are not available yet but they should be in line with the higher-end Android devices out there today, so $200ish versus the $60-$80 sticks and boxes some Android systems are marketing.
Very interesting. With so many software companies moving to Android starting a couple of years ago, and ARM-based all-in-one displays coming on the market, it was not looking al that good for Intel in the digital signage business. But the company is making moves with processors and partnerships (like the Google-derived Chromeboxes and this IAdea set-up) that puts them back in the game.