$20 for something that can compete with a Pi 4 is intriguing, more so if it has a real low-power sleep state like the Pis don't. It's a gnarly chip though: 0.4mm pitch and like two dozen power rails, plus the fanout looks tight even on an eight layer board. I don't see the PMIC they're using anywhere online either... fingers crossed anyway.
I doubt this is aimed at hobbyists but looking to court developers looking for a quick and dirty hammer to drive their IoT nails. Remember those Spin scooters that were running off a Raspberry Pi? That's the market they are after. People who want a cheap low effort embedded computer that runs Linux. They can run a webthing in a container that talks to a cloud thing and bangs on some IO and you have a product.
It does. But my hope is the low effort does not extend all the way through the business decision-making process and we aren't left with millions of vulnerable multi-core Linux computers connected via 5G in random gadgets.
You can buy the chip, but I'm not sure what that gets you. The only publicly available documentation seems to be the datasheet, which only covers its physical and electrical specifications. I don't see any register-level documentation or even a BSP available for it. I don't think you'd be able to actually do anything with the chip without entering some sort of contractual relationship with Qualcomm.
The use case seems limited to "respins of the Uno Q board design" at the moment, but I'm happy to see at least a datasheet with pinouts... most Arm chips with more-than-MCU-level-performance don't even provide that.
It’s a funny state of the world that the flagship hobbyist “open source” development boards now both contain products from such hobbyist-hostile chip companies as Qualcomm and Broadcom!
That display orientation and resolution is likely a carry-over from a phone project. Was probably cheap and easy for them to integrate an existing IP block from an older phone SOC.
That's not $20 to compete with a Pi 4, that's $20 for the bare chip. You have to buy all the supporting hardware on top of that. Hobbyists want to avoid routing LPDDR like the plague. There's also the inconvenient fact that digikey shows "0 In Stock", so this listing is just that, something you can't get your hands on as a hobbyist.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/qualcomm/QRB-2210...
$20 for something that can compete with a Pi 4 is intriguing, more so if it has a real low-power sleep state like the Pis don't. It's a gnarly chip though: 0.4mm pitch and like two dozen power rails, plus the fanout looks tight even on an eight layer board. I don't see the PMIC they're using anywhere online either... fingers crossed anyway.