Qualcomm has announced a new Snapdragon-based development board for the IoT, but still refuses to conform to the rest of the industry by tirelessly pushing the Internet of Everything (IoE) in all of its marketing materials. The new board will be based on the Snapdragon 410c, part of a range more commonly found in phones than IoT devices.
Nonetheless, the 64-bit DragonBoard, based on a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.2GHz, promises to provide a low-cost development board with high-performance and feature-rich functionality to developers. The on-board memory can be either 533MHz LPDDR2 or LPDDR3, and a Qualcomm VIVE module provides 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth.
A 400MHz Adreno 306 GPU should provide high-quality graphics for displays, with up to 1080p playback and capture. The DragonBoard will support up to a 13 megapixel camera, with hardware-based post-processing and noise reduction. A HDMI-out will support the 1080p picture at 30fps, while two USB 2.0 ports, a micro-USB port, and a microSD card slot round out connectivity – flanked by a whole host of GPIO ports.
“The DragonBoard 410c is a powerful, low-cost platform engineered to allow the rapid development of commercial solutions to address the expanding embedded compute and IoE industries across multiple operating systems,” said Jason Bremner, SVP of product management for Qualcomm Technologies.
In addition, the DragonBoard has been designed to be compatible with the 96Boards Consumer Edition requirements. These minimum specifications have been written up by 96Boards, with support from the non-profit Linaro, to further the development of open source software on the ARM architecture – so that designs that conform to the spec can be supported by add-on products, expansion boards (shields) and accessories.
The new board should be available this summer, and Qualcomm is currently allowing interested users to register to be kept up to date with new announcements for the DragonBoard.
Whatever the price of the board, the business model is fairly straightforward. Qualcomm hopes to provide the hardware that the next big thing in the IoT is written on, which should generate hardware orders for Qualcomm’s chips. In addition, Qualcomm has the power of its reputation in the cellular and WiFi markets to leverage – which should prove popular as there are legions of developers who will have previously worked with the chip giant’s hardware at some point in their career.