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Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#461

Post by userbinator »

Alupis wrote: post #456
MountDoom wrote: post #200

The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts. Every time a big player gets involved, they think they can change this. A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI. If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy th…

> A decade ago, Intel tried that back in the day with Galileo / Edison, and tellingly, they came up with the same "ideas": IoT / AI. Intel's execution - as usual - was poor and lacking. Both the Galileo and Edison were much more expensive than their Arduino counterparts, and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space (especially at the time). Neither made it past 5 years without being killed - which is ex…

and their x86 cpu's were of little value within that space

Intel could've attracted the entire retrocomputing community if they realised that the peripherals around x86 and the PC ecosystem were what got them to where they were in the first place, and made Galileo/Edison actually PC-compatible, but they ended up making a SoC with a 486DX+ core and mostly-incompatible peripherals (one would think they should've learned their lesson with the 80186/88...) and somehow convinced Microsoft to make a special version of Windows(!) for it despite a complete lack of any video output capabilities.

"WTF were they thinking!?" is the most concise summary of that fiasco.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#462

Post by angry_octet »

Lady Ada is not impressed:

https://blog.adafruit.com/2025/10/07/qualcomms-latest-ai-pla...

One of their key points is that the AI component is completely tied to the Qualcomm stack, the opposite of Open. Essentially the Arduino brand will live on as a marketing layer over Qualcomm hardware, which you will still need an NDA and significant volume to gain access to.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#463

Post by userbinator »

ac29 wrote: post #112
fidotron wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualcomm are good at radios and associated signal processing. The rest is simply integrations around that.

Yeah, there are only a small handful of companies making radios for mobile networks that I am aware of - its really hard. Qualcomm, Samsung, Mediatek, Apple?

There is also HiSilicon (Huawei), Unisoc (formerly Spreadtrum) also exists in the ultra-low-end segment formerly occupied by Mediatek, and then a bunch of miscellaneous ones like Leadcore, Nufront, and Rockchip.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#464

Post by andoando »

nunobrito wrote: post #315
creshal wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code has enough momentum by now that Microsoft couldn't kill it even if it wanted to. And a lot of the arduino-side work would involve creating/tweaking LSPs to their ideosyncrasies and making IDE-agnostic compilers... all of which is IDE agnostic and makes Arduino more useful to all users. And, worst case, they could take it all to IntelliJ or other IDE vendors and quickly spin out an Arduino-branded IDE that isn…

I'm a java developer coming from a world where the IDE is tightly integrated with the language. For me, VS code always felt like a "jack of all trades and master of none". C/C++ are strongly typed languages, they aren't different from Java in that regard and yet it is so time consuming to navigate code, see if the syntax is correct and so forth. Really annoying to only know if the code is compiling correctly after pr…

Also primarily java/intellij hser but for any non static languages like Js/Python or even simple text editor VS code is lovely. It's very simple to use, looks nice, full of features and the plugin system is beautiful anddd it just feels astonishingly lightweight.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#465

Post by pclmulqdq »

noobermin wrote: post #457
pclmulqdq wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. Except for the Arduino brand. Arduino boards have margins that traditional hardware vendors can only dream of achieving. The only thing carrying that profit margin is the Arduino brand. The software stack is not tied to their hardware, but they make tons of money on hardware.

If life is so sweet for them, why sell arduino?

Because you have a good income stream but you want more money now? Arduino is a lifestyle business (a good lifestyle, don't get me wrong) much more than a growth business. It's easy to price what the income stream is worth.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#466

Post by pclmulqdq »

RealityVoid wrote: post #428
pclmulqdq wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Give it a week to include debugging. Amortize that cost over a million units and engineering time comes out to less than one cent per board.

> A competent engineer designing a devkit as simple as an arduino needs about 1 day of work. Hah! I like to underestimate scope as well, but this is really something else. Definitely a competent engineer could make something like this. But a couple of months maybe. You won't even read the documentation for the chip in a day.

Have you seen the schematics for these boards? They are exceptionally simple. Many devkits are much more complicated.

I have actually done embedded engineering in the past and I was being generous with "a day." Skimming a datasheet is a skill and it certainly will not take a day to get the information you need off of it.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#467

Post by reflexe »

Hopefully it will make Qualcomm behave more like Arduino and not the opposite. Qualcomm is one of the worse companies I have had the pleasure to work with.

Their support model is hellish and they provide very little information and documentation, so usually you’ll end up doing a lot of guessing and reverse engineering. They will tell you to sign a contract with one of their “design partners”, but even they can’t get answers for basic questions.

Seriously, if they want more small cap companies working with them they have to treat them better, I worked with them as a small company and as a larger company and in both cases their support was basically non existent even if we were buying chips from them for more than 10m$ a year.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#468

Post by noobermin »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #465
noobermin wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If life is so sweet for them, why sell arduino?

Because you have a good income stream but you want more money now? Arduino is a lifestyle business (a good lifestyle, don't get me wrong) much more than a growth business. It's easy to price what the income stream is worth.

I don't know if you realise it or not but the point you're making is self-contradictory. If they make great margins, that's why qualcomm would want to buy them, but not why they'd want to sell and have to share it. I guess it makes sense if you're saying arduino are suckers

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#469

Post by z3ratul163071 »

qualcomm are pos.

after more than a decade of releasing CPUs for Linux based Android they released Snapdragon X CPU with Windows only support, intentionally not providing Linux drivers, to chum up with M$.

it was one of the rare opportunities to break the AMD / Apple duopoly for PC CPUs/SoCs.

Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino

#470

Post by consp »

protocolture wrote: post #407
cuttothechase wrote: post #190

The title says - "Qualcomm to Acquire Arduino—Accelerating Developers’ Access to its Leading Edge Computing and AI" Didn't have it on my bingo card that running AI on a microcontroller is what people are salivating for! Not sure if the strategy is to cram AI into every little shoe box out there and keeping fingers crossed for the stock price to trend upwards!?

IIRC some of the ESP boards are "AI Optimised" but its like, facial and license plate recognition, not necessarily LLM stuff.

Is that what we call DSPs now?
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