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The Intel Edison fits two categories -- those who want an Arduino compatible dev board with a few more features, and those who want a true low-power, fast SoC and don't mind doing some work for it.

The unfortunate thing with the Edison is that 95% of the people who purchase one are in the former category. It has a great toolset that allows you to build Arduino-like projects on the Arduino dev board. It seems that when Intel was first pushing these, they sent out the Arduino dev boards to everybody -- so pretty much ALL the tutorials cover that and only that. I'd venture to say that most people are not exploring what this board can do when not paired with the Arduino dev board.

I fall into the second category. This board that includes WiFi, BT plenty of storage and a large amount of RAM is fully x86 compatible and runs Linux with no problem (it comes pre-loaded with a Linux that designed for SoC board -- in fact it was the one that the BBB came with originally). 1.8v and low power consumption means this thing can run off a single 9v battery for about 2 weeks -- 3 if it is mostly idle. The biggest gripe I have with this is that there is little to no documentation on many portions of if. Like all the other SoC's out there, flipping pins are slower than the Arduino, and since everything you do is based on 1.8v and not 5v, plan on buying a bunch of TTLs (or use Sparkfun's awesome GPIO breakout board!).

As far as raw performance goes, this thing is at least 2x faster than the BBB and 3x faster than the Rasp Pi. It's fast enough where it is totally feasible to run a Java based app and a DB like MySQL right on the board and it won't bat an eyelash. It is powerful enough to be a full web server or whatever else you want it to do.

The MRAA library which is what Intel is developing as an API for developers to be able to deploy JavaScript, NodeJS, Python, Java, C++ and C applications is complete, albeit under documented. You will need to dive into their generated docs and examples to figure how to do certain things. I'm waiting for a more full-featured tutorial on how to do certain things without the Arduino Dev Board, but 99% of the things I've needed to do I've been able to figure out.

Out of the two projects I've started with this, one should be released to manufacturing this fall. Intel is fully able to commit to orders of 1,000 or even 10,000 of the board in short order -- which is where all the other SoC boards fall flat.