Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Tour of the Board
First let's take a look at some of the important components on the Galileo.
It's not necessary to fully understand what every single part does or how it
works in order to get the most out of the board, so I'll just stick to the high-
lights, which are shown in
Figure 2-1
.
Figure 2-1.
A few of the important components on the Galileo
Processor (1)
The processor is the brains of the whole operation. Just like the
central
processing unit
, or CPU, on your computer, it carries out all the instruc-
tions in your program by making calculations and reading or writing data
in memory. This particular processor is Intel's Quark SoC X1000 Appli-
cation Processor, which is designed for small-sized, low-power applica-
tions. It's not as powerful as your laptop's CPU, but it's much more pow-
erful than the chip on an Arduino Uno.
Random-access memory (RAM) (2)
Random-access memory
, or RAM, is where Galileo keeps running pro-
grams and keeps track of data that's being used by those programs. The
