Interesting how Arduino is now planning to release a SBC, while Raspberry Pi also has a microcontroller lineup. Now using a RPi or an Arduino board in a project won't mean much when their products are nearly the same.
Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#62Earlier 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.
They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips. Add in a decent x86 to ARM translation layer, and you have the basis of the next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate. At the high-end they announced two new flagship processor platforms at its 2025 Snapdragon Su…
>They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm
did you notice how ARMs stock jumped 5% after that ruling? that tells you everything you need to know.
not to be reddity but reminds me of that scene from The Social Network, where Zuck's buddy couldn't udnerstand how the the record companies winning was actually a massive L.
all the court proved was its total irrelevance to market forces, thats all. ARM is in NVidia accelerators, in Apple phones, in things of actual relevance.
Where is qcom "in"? theyre competing in... laptops!? i could not think of a worse commodity to be in. low volume, no margins, no added value. NPUs? holy snakeoil. again, this edge inferencing that nobody cares about. theres not even a roadmap for anyone to care about it.
>next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
yeah, a market of what, $50M? jeez louise.
>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm
seems to be the only thing going for it.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
google is competing with a different offering. with a pixel you get google's ecosystem. apple is also not neccesarily top dog in performance (maybe they are - havne't checked lately), nobody buys an iphone because it ranks highly in benchmarks. thats some nerd nonsense that 0.1% of the audience seriously cares about. for google, pushing 3rd parties out of the supply chain gives them a ton of security and stability co…
Apple A series CPUs and now M series CPUs have consistently been top of the benchmarks in single core performance for most of the last decade. This even holds true when pitted against desktop Intel and AMD chips. For someone who works with workloads that struggle to be very multithreaded, I do watch this. I must be that 0.1% of the audience
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#64theyre 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.
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Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#65Additionally, 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.
Yes, this new board is more of a Raspberry Pi replacement than an Arduino Uno replacement.
More specifically, I can see it trying to compete with things like those funny Chinese boards built around SoCs like SG2000. Those embed a Linux capable core, a small NPU, a camera interface with ISP and video codecs, and a secondary RTOS core for realtime control. Basically built for drones and simple robots. The caveat of those boards being: the documentations sucks, the SDK is wack, you get 3 example scripts and are entirely on your own outside that.
Qualcomm could be trying to branch into drones/robotics/etc with this move.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#66If you ever wondered, how Arduino came about: The Untold History of Arduino ( https://arduinohistory.github.io/ ).
Arduino has always been a naked cash grab disguised as a "hacker-friendly nonprofit." The gross margin on their boards is >90%, and yeah, the software is mostly a ripoff of wiring.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're more fun. The programming is easier (although you can get an Arduino like experience on a ESP32). They have 5V options, which make some projects easier without having to add additional components. The ESP32 API (and the Pico for that matter) are better suited professional programmers. An Arduino is better if you're doing something and want a quick, easy, simple to program controller. It started as a way for a…
Ain't fun spending $40 for a 'fun' project. ESP32 is like a dollar for WiFi and GPIOs. That's fun.
ESP32 is a dumpster fire IMO.
I prefer to get things done quickly over cheap.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#68This is desperation and I think it will go nowhere good.
Arduino has neither technical (standards, form-factor, pinouts), nor mindshare among developers that can be useful for high-speed, modern and upcoming AI-on-the-edge applications.
It sounds like Qualcomm is making a belated move towards robotics, but acquiring these assets is only going to distract them from becoming a successful player.
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#69call me cynical but I can't imagine this ending very well. Even if qualcomm does nothing to alter the operations at Arduino, what happens if they go belly-up in a decade?
Re: Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
#70With their goal of 50/50 handset/non-handset revenue split by 2030, and their recent acquisitions pointing in the same direction, it stands to reason that they will do a lot of high capex investments into things like chiplet/chiplet communication for datacenters, automation/automotive, as well as edge AI. We can also observe they're baking in a lot of fpga-style configurability into a lot of these product lines - the connectivity fabric they acquired along with alphawave semi, their hexagon dsp, nuvia(oryon which they won the legal case for recently), etc,. which is another hint for the type of market they're targeting.
My opinion is that they should productize ESP [1] (no, not that one) which will be super harmonious with their goals.
Arduino acquisition, IMO, is putting one foot into manufacturing automation/automotive/sensors field. They have done similar in the past, arriver was an ADAS compute thing.
Personally I don't believe they will take the execution risk and scale up on all of these things. They will probably wait for the right time and chop off a few of these things and focus on whatever looks like it's going to be a cash cow.
Finance wise, there will be near term margin pressure but long term (IMO) they will execute superbly on a portion of their bets.
The main problem is the clock is ticking, handsets becoming commodified leading to vertical integration, licensing losing value, etc. Apple modem agreement running out soon too, and 6G modems too will not be as high margin due to diminishing improvements in telecom tech, even operator uptake at this point is looking unlikely after the 5G... debacle.
Which explains the very diverse bets they have made.
Will be interesting to see what they execute in this limited timeframe.