Qualcomm is making a platform with their Snapdragon X CPUs that actually works right, the Dragonwing IQ10 RRD. SemiAccurate is happy that Qualcomm is admitting what we have said all along about OSes and thinks this may be a very cool platform.
The IQ10 is sadly not a PC or consumer focused device even though it uses the current X Elite 18-core SoC that is a consumer product. This device is a robotics development platform with all the bells and whistles built in. Software is Ubuntu Linux so that should work well, and there is said to be a full suite of developer tools that comes with it. The spec sheet looks like this.
Actually really good specs here
As you can see, there are plentiful I/O capabilities from wireless, Wi-Fi 7 and 5G, to 10GbE and Ethercat. Data in and out should not be a bottleneck, same with video which is something that you really need for robotics. This comes in the form of 12 GMSL ports which should be more than enough. Better yet there are two DP2.1 out ports so you can make your industrial robot have a cute face with big eyes that blink occasionally. Awwww, automotive welding robots are the next Labubus.
On the compute side, the IQ10 comes with 64GB of LPDDR5x, 512GB of USF4.0 G5 storage, and a 2280 M.2 slot if you need more. Qualcomm is claiming over 700TOPS of AI performance, basically adding up the CPU, GPU, and NPU top line numbers, plus 8K120 video encode. As long as that 8K120 can be broken down into smaller chunks for multiple cameras, all good. Since Qualcomm has a very capable ISP, that shouldn’t be a problem but it wasn’t directly stated.
What makes this platform interesting is not the raw specs but the way Qualcomm is aiming it at the plug and play robotics development community. As they pointed out, using a non-bespoke platform means you use things like USB cameras and the like for development, then port things to a GMSL or whatnot device for deployment on final hardware.
Qualcomm is offering all the ‘final hardware’ type interfaces in the development kit, you don’t usually see GMSL or Ethercat on a single board PC. The idea is to minimize the time, effort, and cost to bring a project to market, fair enough. The software is there out of the box, as are the tools, so it should be as painless as you can ask for in a development kit. Remember this is NOT a consumer product, it is meant for those making robots, and it looks like they nailed that aspect.
The one problem SemiAccurate has with the IQ10 is not with the product itself, it is what IQ10 shows about other Qualcomm products. If you recall we have been down on the Snapdragon X line of SoCs because the silicon may be good but the end products simply don’t work right.
Qualcomm goes out of their way to block users from running Linux even though Windows on the Snapdragon X line is an incompatible mess of patches and questionable claims. They company claims various reasons about why they won’t support Linux, none of which seem to be true, and behind the scenes go out of their way to make things not work. This idiocy really hurts the product and sales of Snapdragon laptops reflect it.
With the IQ10, Qualcomm directly says what we have known all along, Linux runs just fine on Snapdragon X, and has for years. Qualcomm has an internal distro, the IQ10 literally runs Ubuntu, and all is good. The first public demo of the Snapdragon X was on Linux because it was faster and more stable than Windows. Publicly they won’t admit any of this but the IQ10 shows what is really going on, when you need reliability and performance, PR BS doesn’t cut it.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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