I went browsing around their site this morning when I got the email of the release. I cannot say that I understand Intel's strategy here. On the one hand they could release 'Quark' like Atmel ships AVR's or ST Micro ships STM32 chips with a data sheet and a demo board, on the other they seem to want to jump into some sort of "Intel at System supplier" kind of thing where its mosly proprietary interfaces and only works with their stuff.

When I look at something like the Nucleo boards[1] I see a chip company leveraging the energy around Arduino to push their own ISA, but that is just a form factor play AFAICT. What does Intel hope to achieve here? And can they do that without being a crapload more "open" than they have been in the past?

[1] http://www.mouser.com/new/stmicroelectronics/stm-nucleo-deve...