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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#21

Post by geerlingguy »

c0balt wrote: post #16
geerlingguy wrote: post #3

Additionally, they're launching their first joint product, the $44 Uno Q SBC, which has a Dragonwing SoC and STM32 microcontroller on an Uno form factor board[1]. It seems like Arduino will keep their brand, maintain their existing product lines, and continue building devices using other vendor's chips (besides Qualcomm), etc... but as with all acquisitions—I wonder how long that state of affairs will last. Alternati…

This board has onboard EMMC, wifi/ble and can run a full Linux. That is more of an rp 4/5 with an rp2xxx tagged on the side. It comes with their own arduino IDE installed too It is kinda disappointing but I can see why Qualcomm wants to use the brand.

I'm speaking in a broader sense, comparing the variety of other Arduino boards like the Uno R3/R4. That wasn't too clear in the OP, sorry!

The concern I have with the $44 Q is it has 2GB of RAM and 16GB eMMC, and a processor that's probably between a Pi 3 and Pi 4 in terms of speed and IO (though 4nm, so probably much more efficient).

For $45 I can buy a Pi 5 with it's own built-in GPIO, PCIe, and a much faster SoC, though it lacks a few niceties like the Q form factor, the more efficient SoC, a realtime microcontroller, and a USB-C port with display out capabilities (I really wish Pi had that...).

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#22

Post by Teknomadix »

webdevver wrote: post #4

theyre going to push "AI on the edge" and "IoT" nonsense again absolutely unbelievably cooked. anyone pushing that nonsense, short with leverage. low latency connectivity + goliath data centres will always beat on-device inference/training.

Not necessarily. There are lots of use cases for on device AI inference. I run YOLO on an Nvidia Jetson powered Lenovo Think Edge, which processes incoming video at full frame rates on four channels with recognition and classification for a bespoke premises security system. No clouds involved other than the Nix package manager etc. Make sure your argument May carry more weight when you're talking about ultra low power devices like an Arduino running AI inference locally that seems like more of a stretch.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#23

Post by geerlingguy »

josephcsible wrote: post #18
phoehne wrote: post #6

You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue. While I haven't exhaustively looked, one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only. And that would be my worry. I…

> one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only. Under what legal theory?

The "we have lawyers and lots of money to enforce things that are on shaky legal ground and you will likely settle instead of fighting in court" legal theory, I presume.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#24

Post by jsheard »

webdevver wrote: post #10
murillians wrote: post #5

I only feel dread when I see a Qualcomm story on HN anymore.

genuinely, what is the survival story for qualcomm entering the next decade? - completely missed out on AI - phones become commodity, push for complete vertical integration from apple, google - squeezed by chinese soc vendors from 'below' (mediatek, unisoc) they're cooked, right? there's no way out, surely.

Apple's vertical integration is formidable but Google are still really struggling with their execution, their Tensor SOCs are consistently years behind Snapdragon in performance and efficiency even after their switch to TSMC this generation. Qualcomm is probably safe at the high end of the Android market for a while yet.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#25

Post by q3k »

josephcsible wrote: post #18
phoehne wrote: post #6

You can make a low volume product by buying a bunch of Arduinos as your controller. You just stick them in the device. There's no license issue. While I haven't exhaustively looked, one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only. And that would be my worry. I…

> one vendor's kit I did look at explicitly stated their boards were not licensed for that kind of commercial use. Qualcomm could very well make their boards for development, test, and evaluation purposes only. Under what legal theory?

One way they could do this is grant you a patent license only for some kinds of use.

(and eg. make sure their products are useless without some patent license for some software driver or algorithm)

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#26

Post by nic547 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #3

Additionally, they're launching their first joint product, the $44 Uno Q SBC, which has a Dragonwing SoC and STM32 microcontroller on an Uno form factor board[1]. It seems like Arduino will keep their brand, maintain their existing product lines, and continue building devices using other vendor's chips (besides Qualcomm), etc... but as with all acquisitions—I wonder how long that state of affairs will last. Alternati…

STM32 MCUs are 3V3, not 5V right?

Arduino really isn't great with naming, a Uno can be an AVR or ARM based board, now either 3V3 or 5V based and also a SBC rather than just a MCU.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#27

Post by webdevver »

ivape wrote: post #15
webdevver wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

genuinely, what is the survival story for qualcomm entering the next decade? - completely missed out on AI - phones become commodity, push for complete vertical integration from apple, google - squeezed by chinese soc vendors from 'below' (mediatek, unisoc) they're cooked, right? there's no way out, surely.

Cooked hardware companies get bought into it seems. Intel is the most egregious example, but AMD is being circled by OpenAI now for 10%. Companies like Marvell and even hard drive companies are up due to how they fit into the AI pipeline.

But intel being "cooked" was a massive psyop. how was intel ever "cooked", when they were still designing, taping out, and delivering massive quantities of CPUs to DCs and consumer products?

AMD briefly gave them a run for their money, but it was nowhere near the catastrophe that bulldozer was, where the company basically needed rescuing. For a brief moment, they weren't a monopolist - that's all that happened, right?

AMD being circled by OpenAI makes sense since AMD makes NVidia knockoffs. that's objectively useful. Harddrive company make sense for storing weights and generative content. Marvell is networking...

what does QCOm present here, that openai or the AI scene at large needs? the only bet is robotics - but why on earth would I put some washed-up adreno into a 40kg man-sized apparatus which would very comfortably fit a H100?

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#28

Post by fidotron »

tylergetsay wrote: post #20

Espressif has been eating their lunch, the boards are way more capable and much cheaper. Why would anyone pick an Uno over an ESP32?

The fact we don't have viable western competition for Espressif is likely to become far more of a headache than all the angst about AI GPU production.

Where can you get a half decent microcontroller with wifi integrated on it? Espressif. All the others are flat out bad in some very important dimension, which isn't to say the Espressif products are perfect, but they fit in the important ways.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#30

Post by ACCount37 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #11

I've not used an arduino for a number of years, I assume this means they are not going to use atmel/microchip anymore?

Arduino wasn't strictly confined to Atmel/Microchip for a while now. Their newest mainstream boards roll with Renesas chips.

And Qualcomm itself is not in the business of making mass market MCUs. Does Qualcomm want to be?

They can, they already have the kind of dies they could put into those. But they would be competing against the likes of ST, and they wouldn't have the wide ass margins they're used to.

They would also have to be writing public documentation, and dealing with hobbyists and small developers. And the impression I got from dealing with Qualcomm? They'd rather douse themselves in gasoline and set themselves on fire than acknowledge that small developers exist.

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