Damn I hadn't heard about that problem with the Quark. What I had heard was that it was notoriously difficult to get a hold of low level docs so that you could do anything serious with it (or was that the Curie or Edison?), which put me off trying their line up because all of the ARM Cortex stuff is pretty much open compared to them (CMSIS makes a lot of peripherals trivial to deal with compared to some of the mess that used to exist for ARM).
I don't think it was widely reported, but it was kind of a dealbreaker because it meant that existing x86 code simply wouldn't run and therefore it was impossible to use standard Linux distros or toolchains on the Quark. Between that, the difficulty of getting chips, the rather poor performance and power usage, and the complexity of integrating it, I think it was basically dead on arrival. The main thing Intel seemed to get out of it was a bunch of very favourable articles about how they'd be part of the Internet of Things revolution. The whole thing seemed ill-conceived; it was a 486 going up against modern RISC designs with predictable results.
Correct I could not find docs for the Curie to provide any insight into how everything worked, technically. I found some docs which contained a block diagram and saw the bluetooth module is a Nordic NRF51822. That package is a full Bluetooth stack as well as an arm cortex processor. I could not however determine how it was connected to the rest of the system, nor figure out if there was a way to get direct access to that arm cortex.
