There have been many questions about what direction Arduino would take after being bought by Qualcomm. Now it would seem that we’re getting a clearer picture. Perhaps unsurprisingly the answer appears to be ‘AI’, with the new Arduino VENTUNO Q SBC being advertised as ‘democratizing AI’ in the Qualcomm press release, although it also references robotics.
This new board is based around the Dragonwing IQ-8275 SoC along with an STM32H5F5 MCU, making it somewhat of a beefier brother of the previously covered Arduino Uno Q, which also offers an SoC/MCU hybrid solution. On the product page we can see the overall specifications for this new board, where the release date is specified as ‘soon’.
Its IQ-8275 SoC is part of Qualcomm’s IQ8 series, with eight 2.35 GHz ARM cores and an Adreno 623 GPU, paired with 16 GB of LPDDR5. The Cortex M33-based STM32H5F5 MCU comes with its own 4 MB of Flash and 1.5 MB of RAM, all on a board that’s significantly larger than the Uno Q and isn’t crippled by a single USB-C port as SoC I/O.
Although clearly more aimed at industrial and automation applications than the solution-in-search-of-a-problem Uno Q board, it remains to be seen whether this board will catch on with Arduino fans, or whether Qualcomm’s goal is more to break into whole new markets under the Arduino brand.