Amazing how the state of QCOM SoCs and SBCs is still so bad over 10 years after the Raspberry Pi debuted.
When I was working at QCOM in 2012 we were all excited for a Snapdragon based Raspberry Pi-like SBC since the CPUs were much more powerful than the Broadcomm BCM2835. We kept asking our internal R&D teams for something equivalent and ended up with repurposed cell phone testing hardware that only ran a heavily modified version of Android.
QCOM eventually partnered with Inforce to make the IFC SBCs[1], which had some nice features like 1gig Ethernet and SATA, but they ran heavily customized Android and Linux. The boards I have are still functional but the OS is forever stuck in 2013 and impossible to update.
We were part of the server management group that procured ran and deployed hardware and operating systems to our datacenters. When we tried to give feedback all we got was silence or "well customers don't need that" when here we were the exact customers that would purchase them.
Eventually they released Centriq [2] which landed with a dull thud.
QCOM had a huge opportunity here, but due to all the corporate politics about who would "own" the product and focusing on trying to run Android, Linux, and Windows on these devices they never managed to pull it off. Classic example of completely not understanding the target market or listening to customers, and now companies like Ampere and Annapurna Labs are eating their lunch.
Jesus fuck do I wish you could actually buy these parts without a stupid NDA and a massive corporation behind you. IDK how many of you dig through digikey frequently but there are NO modern ARM CPUs available to the public. Most stuff is still A9, best case A53/55/72. If you want real modern capabilities you have to buy a SOM.
As far as I can tell from browsing through that list, the vast majority of them are either not actually sold by Arrow (not just that they're not in stock, you can't even back-order them or request a quote), or have minimum order quantities of $100k+.
Of the 7 chips that are actually stocked, none seems to have a publicly available datasheet.
When I was working at QCOM in 2012 we were all excited for a Snapdragon based Raspberry Pi-like SBC since the CPUs were much more powerful than the Broadcomm BCM2835. We kept asking our internal R&D teams for something equivalent and ended up with repurposed cell phone testing hardware that only ran a heavily modified version of Android.
QCOM eventually partnered with Inforce to make the IFC SBCs[1], which had some nice features like 1gig Ethernet and SATA, but they ran heavily customized Android and Linux. The boards I have are still functional but the OS is forever stuck in 2013 and impossible to update.
We were part of the server management group that procured ran and deployed hardware and operating systems to our datacenters. When we tried to give feedback all we got was silence or "well customers don't need that" when here we were the exact customers that would purchase them.
Eventually they released Centriq [2] which landed with a dull thud.
QCOM had a huge opportunity here, but due to all the corporate politics about who would "own" the product and focusing on trying to run Android, Linux, and Windows on these devices they never managed to pull it off. Classic example of completely not understanding the target market or listening to customers, and now companies like Ampere and Annapurna Labs are eating their lunch.
1. https://www.electronicspecifier.com/products/communications/...
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Centriq