The system was initially announced to be the same size and shape as an SD card and containing a dual-core Intel Quark x86[3] CPU at 400 MHz communicating via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

[10] He also announced that the Wolfram Language and Mathematica will be available on the Intel Edison[11][12] and that the device will be able to run Linux.

The board's main SoC is a 22 nm Intel Atom "Tangier" (Z34XX) that includes two Atom Silvermont cores running at 500 MHz and one Intel Quark core at 100 MHz (for executing RTOS ViperOS).

[14] It runs Yocto Linux with development support for Arduino IDE, Eclipse (C, C++, Python), and Intel XDK (NodeJS, HTML5).

The table below lists the signals from the Edison Module that are routed to the four breakout connector (J17-J20).