Sharks Cove Board – Microsoft And Intel Collaborate To Take On Raspberry PI

The popularity of Raspberry PI board has not gone un-noticed by big boys like Intel and Microsoft. The two companies are joining hand with a hardware manufacturer CircuitCo, the maker of BeagleBone Black and MinnowBoard; in creating a low-cost SoC development board called Sharks Cove.

The board features Intel Atom Z3735G quad-core CPU running at 1.33Ghz and up to 1.88GHz, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of flash storage. Storage is expendable using MicroSD slot. It provides a wide range of interfaces such as GPIO, I2C, I2S, UART, SDIO, USB, and MIPI – giving a complete development platform for Windows and Android drivers.

The Sharks Cove will cost $299 and is available for pre-order now. While it is affordable, It is obviously much more expensive than the Raspberry PI, and there are much cheaper alternative to x86 developer board than Sharks Cove such as the MinnowBoard which is only $99.