Intel Moves to Speed Up and Shrink Industrial Computing

One potential innovation that can change this is an FPGA, or field programmable gate array, which Altera specializes in. These chips can be tweaked to push through specialized tasks at faster rates. Companies use these customizable chips to speed up things like routers and switches, and systems that handle digital signals and video.

Financial firms, to illustrate, have used FPGAs to hasten financial calculations, during oil and gas companies use the chips to quicken the computing process of geological data.

Intel believes packaging the E600C with FPGA will allow for a wider range of products, embedded with task-specific chips, to be brought to market faster without having to perform extensive hardware changes. That means the new evolution of the Atom could be custom tailored for industrial machines, portable medical equipment, communications gear, vision system, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) devices, high-performance programmable logic controllers and embedded computers.

"Manufacturers want to converge their IT and factory control systems," explained Intel's Ian Gilvarry, who serves as strategic market manager for its industrial automation group, in an interview with IndustryWeek. "One of the biggest drivers is to get access to real-time data on factory systems to support decision-making. And more and more, you're seeing that manufacturers want to be able to take applications that have run on industrial PCs and want them scaled furthermore and furthermore into industrial control devices. That's where the innovation is going."