Avnet AI Vision Development Kit features Qualcomm QCS6490 SoC, dual camera, GbE, and USB-C PD

QCS6490 Vision AI Development Kit

Just last month at Embedded World 2024, Qualcomm announced its RB3 Gen 2 Platform based on the QCS6490 processor with Cortex-A78 and A55 processing cores and 12 TOPS of AI power. Building on this, Avnet has recently launched the Avnet AI Vision Development Kit, also based on the QCS6490 SoC. The kit includes a dual camera setup, Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, USB-C Power Delivery, and a host of other features for applications like inventory and asset monitoring, drone/UAV/other mobile vision-AI edge compute applications, and multi-camera security systems with recognition. Previously we have written about similar AI dev kits including Allwinner V853 100ASK-V853-Pro, Sipeed Maix-III devkit, RZBoard V2L, and many other AI vision development boards feel free to check those out if you are interested in the topic. Avnet AI Vision Development Kit specifications SM2S-QCS6490 SMARC Compute Module: CPU – 4x Arm Cortex-A78 (up to 2.7 GHz), 4x Arm Cortex-A55 (up to […]

Linux 6.9 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.9 release

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.9 on LKML: So Thorsten is still reporting a few regression fixes that haven’t made it to me yet, but none of them look big or worrisome enough to delay the release for another week. We’ll have to backport them when they get resolved and hit upstream. So 6.9 is now out, and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal). Below is the shortlog for the last week, with the changes mostly being dominated by some driver updates (gpu and networking being the big ones, but “big” is still pretty small, and there’s various other driver noise in there too). Outside of drivers, it’s some filesystem fixes (bcachefs still stands out, but ksmbd shows up too), some late selftest fixes, and some core networking fixes. And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine […]

Qualcomm RB3 Gen 2 Platform with Qualcomm QCS6490 AI SoC targets robotics, IoT and embedded applications

Qualcomm RB3 Gen 2 Platform Vision Kit

Qualcomm had two main announcements at Embedded World 2024: the ultra-low-power Qualcomm QCC730 WiFi microcontroller for battery-powered IoT devices and the Qualcomm RB3 Gen 2 Platform hardware and software solution designed for IoT and embedded applications based on the Qualcomm QCS6490 processor that we’re going to cover today. The kit is comprised of a QCS6490 octa-core Cortex-A78/A55 system-on-module with 12 TOPS of AI performance, 6GB RAM, and 128GB UFS flash connected to the 96Boards-compliant Qualcomm RBx development mainboard through interposer, as well as optional cameras, microphone array, and sensors. Qualcomm QCS6490/QCM6490 IoT processor Specifications: CPU – Octa-core Kryo 670 with 1x Gold Plus core (Cortex-A78) @ 2.7 GHz, 3x Gold cores (Cortex-A78) @ 2.4 GHz, 4x Silver cores (Cortex-A55) @ up to 1.9 GHz GPU – Adreno 643L GPU @ 812 MHz with support for Open GL ES 3.2, Open CL 2.0, Vulkan 1.x, DX FL 12 DSP – Hexagon […]

Qualcomm QCC730 low-power Arm Cortex-M4F WiFi 4 SoC targets battery-powered IoT applications

Qualcomm QCC730 dual WiFi IoT microcontroller

Qualcomm has unveiled the “micro-power” QCC730 Arm Cortex-M4F dual-band WiFi 4 microcontroller for the IoT market that targets similar applications as the Espressif ESP32 microcontrollers but potentially at lower power consumption with claims of up to 88% lower power than “previous generations” making it suitable for battery-powered industrial, commercial and consumer applications. To highlight the low-power consumption, the company also mentions that QCC730 devices could become high-performance alternatives to Bluetooth IoT solutions with direct cloud connectivity. Qualcomm QCC730 specifications: CPU core – Arm Cortex-M4F @ 60 MHz Memory/ Storage 1.5 MB RAM, including 600KB for user app (On-chip RRAM (NVM) to host application without the need for an external NOR flash) 640 KB SRAM, including 260KB for user app XiP over QSPI Flash Wi-Fi Standards: 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, 802.11a Spectral Bands: 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz Channels: 20 MHz Antenna Configuration: 1×1 Features: up to MCS3 Interfaces – Master I2C, 15x […]

8devices TobuFi SoM is designed for drones, robotics, and advanced audio systems

8devices TobuFi SoM

8devices has recently introduced TobuFi, a Qualcomm QCS405-powered System-on-Module (SoM) featuring dual-band Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5 capabilities. The device also features 1GB LPDDR3, 8GB of eMMC storage, and multiple display resolutions. It also offers various interfaces, including USB 3.0, HDMI, I2S, DMIC, SDC, UART, SPI, I2C, and GPIO. In previous posts, we covered 8devices product launches like the Noni M.2 WiFi 7 module, Rambutan and Rambutan-I modules, Habanero IPQ4019 SoM, Mango-DVK OpenWrt Devkit, and many more innovative products. If you’re interested in 8devices, feel free to check those out for more details. 8devices TobuFi SoM specifications: SoC – Qualcomm QCS405 CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 at 1.4GHz; 64-bit GPU – Qualcomm Adreno 306 GPU at 600MHz; supports 64-bit addressing DSP – Qualcomm Hexagon QDSP6 v66 with Low Power Island and Voice accelerators Memory – 1GB LPDDR3 + 8GB eMMC Storage 8GB eMMC flash SD card – One 8-bit (SDC1, 1.8V) and one […]

Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon X80 5G modem with NB-NTN satellite connectivity, AI Hub, and FastConnect 7900 WiFi 7 chip

Snapdragon X80 5G modem satellite

Mobile World Congress 2024 (MWC 2024) has just started, and Qualcomm had three major announcements with the introduction of the Snapdragon X80 5G modem with NB-NTN satellite connectivity, the Qualcomm AI Hub with over 75 AI models optimized for Snapdragon processors, and the FastConnect 7900 WiFi 7, Bluetooth, and Ultra Wideband (UWB) chip. Snapdragon X80 5G modem-RF system Snapdragon X80 5G modem specifications: Peak download speed – 10 Gbps Peak upload speed – 3.5 Gbps Cellular Modem-RF Specs – 10CC aggregation in mmWave, 5CC aggregation in 5G sub-6GHz Cellular Technology 5G NR, sub-6 GHz Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) LTE, WCDMA, LAA, TD-SCDMA, GSM/EDGE, CBRS mmWave, sub-6 carrier aggregation (FDD-FDD) sub-6 carrier aggregation (TDD-TDD), 5G FDD, 5G TDD, sub-6 carrier aggregation (FDD-TDD) 5G SA (standalone), 5G NSA (non-standalone) F + F ULCA, FDD UL MIMO, Switched Uplink, 3GPP R18-ready (5G Advanced-ready), 6x CA sub-6 downlink carrier aggregation, 1024-QAM sub-6, FR1 + […]

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC benchmarks in Windows and Linux

Snapdragon X Elite reference laptop 23W vs 80W

Qualcomm unveiled the 4.3 GHz 12-core Snapdragon X Elite processor for laptops last week since some bold claims about the performance and efficiency. The company has now released benchmarks for the processor verified by third parties such as Anandtech and Notebookcheck showing the new Snapdragon processor performance is quite amazing with the Arm processor indeed matching Apple, Intel, and AMD high-end chips. What’s more is that the new SoC was tested in both Windows and Linux (using Geekbench 6.2), so in hindsight, I was wrong to say the Snapdragon X Lite would be a Windows-only processor when only seeing the DX12 listed in the specifications… Before we look into the benchmark results, we should note that Qualcomm provided two versions of the Snapdragon X Elite laptop prototype both using active cooling: “demo config A” high-performance system configured to run at an 80W TDP, and a low-power, thinner “demo config B” […]

Linux 6.6 LTS release – Highlights, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.6 release

The Linux 6.6 release has just been announced by Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): So this last week has been pretty calm, and I have absolutely no excuses to delay the v6.6 release any more, so here it is. There’s a random smattering of fixes all over, and apart from some bigger fixes to the r8152 driver, it’s all fairly small. Below is the shortlog for last week for anybody who really wants to get a flavor of the details. It’s short enough to scroll through. This obviously means that the merge window for 6.7 opens tomorrow, and I appreciate how many early pull requests I have lined up, with 40+ ready to go. That will make it a bit easier for me to deal with it, since I’ll be on the road for the first week of the merge window. Linus About two months ago, […]

EmbeddedTS embedded systems design