Qualcomm to acquire Arduino
(qualcomm.com)1337 points by janjongboom 7 days ago
1337 points by janjongboom 7 days ago
I don't think Qualcomm bought them to destroy them. I think they see Arduino as a gateway. Instead of hoping students will learn ARM it's more reasonable to leverage Arduino's simple nature to act as an on-ramp for more low level developers. I wouldn't be surprised if Arduino IDE saw a revamp to better support jumping the gap between the Arduino to Snapdragon.
ST and TI do the same thing with their boards too and it's not a bad strategy.
People are making so much of this when it seems so much simpler. Qualcomm likes buying high-margin businesses, and Arduino is a high-margin business. Gross margin on their boards is over 90% (hence why you can buy a Chinese clone of a $30 board for $3) and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. The TI equivalent of the $30 Arduino Uno is $5, and it's a true gateway product.
The Raspberry Pi Pico blows the Arduino out of the water in terms of computational speed, available RAM and so on, and it costs a fraction. I don't remember using an Arduino since the Pi Pico came out. And if the Pico isn't enough there are the bigger family members waiting in the wings. For me Arduino is mostly over. And then there is Espressif as well, they make some neat boards.
You seem to equate gateway product = affordable but, IMHO, a gateway product is something that people who are not in the field are likely to stumble upon. I recently saw Arduino kits for kids at a small local bookstore, I can imagine someone thinking "hey this electronic thingy looks cool I'll buy one for my niece's birthday". On the flip side, people who don't know anything about microcontrollers are not going to look online for Chinese Arduino clones.
clone relies on hardware being designed and software written - this takes a lot of money, so you can't just count the final price of parts as the price.
Arduino is open sourced in hard and software which allows this cheap cloning to exist. It also helps a lot with software and docs, which makes it cheaper for them.
Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point. Today, you can buy an ESP32 dev board with wifi for $6. Or an Arduino Uno Wifi for $55.
Note that both Bluepill and ESP32 can be programmed in the Arduino IDE, using the Arduino library, and the vast library of Arduino sketches and 3rd party libraries (as long as they don't use AVR assembly language.
So can the Pi Pico, the Milk-V Duo (one 64 bit Linux core, one 64 bit microcontroller core), and many others.
> Some years back when bluepills ran $2, Arduinos seemed to have no point.
But you still used the Arduino SDK with the bluepill, so clearly Arduino had a point. Unless you were one of the few masochist who dealt with the STM32 toolchain directly for fun?
The Pi Pico is such a breath of fresh air in that regard. Finally a decent-enough toolchain for a decent-enough performing ARM MCU!
Take it with a grain of salt, but the rep I've been in contact with said they'd be releasing more on the SoC...
Genuine Qualcomm! And u/geerlingguy already has a youtube video up promoting the new SoCs...
> Alternatives like the Pi RP2040/2350 and Espressif's vast selection of boards can fill the gaps, but Arduino was what got me and many people I know into microcontrollers, so I have a special fondness for them!
Exactly. For the people who did not follow a structured educational program on embedded programming, starting with an SMT microcontroller was very hard.
Arduino made this fun and easy with their language & IDE combo. Typing some code and seeing the lights on the board reacting is a hell of a drug.
Once you mastered the IDE, you could either program other microcontrollers in the same IDE, or at some point you hit the limits and started digging into the vendor-specific toolchains.
If I started again today, I would again start with an Arduino.
I think to Arduino, Uno just means 'Uno form factor, with shield pins in the same place'
Which is kind of sad, since the Uno pinout is horrible for high-speed signals
Depends on the MCU, but generally STM32 is 1.7-3.6V
This reminds me of the Arduino Intel Galileo.
That is quite some board! Arduino has certainly progressed, I'm still playing around with R3 boards and ATMega chips. Other than the form factor, this looks like not only a completely different class of product, but a completely different hobby or business.
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.
I'm speaking in a broader sense, comparing the variety of other Arduino boards like the Uno R3/R4. That wasn't too clear in the OP, sorry!
The concern I have with the $44 Q is it has 2GB of RAM and 16GB eMMC, and a processor that's probably between a Pi 3 and Pi 4 in terms of speed and IO (though 4nm, so probably much more efficient).
For $45 I can buy a Pi 5 with it's own built-in GPIO, PCIe, and a much faster SoC, though it lacks a few niceties like the Q form factor, the more efficient SoC, a realtime microcontroller, and a USB-C port with display out capabilities (I really wish Pi had that...).
To me the benefits of an MCU have to do with latency on things like interrupts. A real OS sometimes gets in the way, if you're trying to run things on very tight timing, or want to go super low power. That's why even though I'm drowning in under-used Pis, I'm using Picos to drive the lights I'm making. (Trying to coordinate multiple 3w RGB LED floods with < 10ms of latency for fancy lighting effects - because as a maker - I can do it for as little as 10 times the cost of buying it). Also, I would rather release the magic blue smoke out of a $5 Pico than a $40+ RPi. Although the Zeros were nice. We should have another round of zeros.
There’s been plenty of progress. There’ve been three newer generations since the A53: the A55, then the A510, then the A520.
But what you think of as an old core design is in fact a mature, well-understood, well-tested, widely-supported, cost-effective core design. It also has some features such as in-order execution which none of the newer chips have. From an engineering perspective, it still can make a lot of sense in the right applications today.
There are some advantages to Arduino. Like <100ms boot times, you can go from power on to running within a blink of an eye.
This _is_ possible with Linux, but not at all trivial and likely impossible with general-purpose distros.
Interrupt handling and (on RP2040) dedicated multicore code is also nice.
I guess I'm replying to you with your own video? But it seems interesting and relevant [1].
Arduino is dead, ESP is better.
They're trying to bring Arduino back from the dead.
Do you happen to know how good the Linux environment is on the Dragonwing SoC.
I think their slides say Debian, but didn't mention what binary blobs one needs to have for enabling various functionality the SoC provides / how much their kernel deviates from mainline kernel ...
Were you paid to make this comment? As a youtuber, are you partnering with Qualcomm or Arduino and are you positioning their brands and products?
Edit: I see you already have a video out about the acquisition that looks a lot like an ad as well...
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 the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that.
And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing.
I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community, but if they wanted that, there's a million better ways. Starting with making documentation, SDKs, and toolchains accessible and easy to use. There's a reason why you see Microchip, STM, RPi, and Espressif chips in every other DIY project.
> 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.
> The problem is that there just isn't a whole lot of money to be made in providing hobby hardware for enthusiasts.
With Arduino, the hardware is probably the least interesting/important part. The software side is more important, providing an easy-to-use IDE and a simplified API and platform abstraction layer to make it super-easy to get started. Then there's the documentation, sample code, and community.
Indeed, at this point, there are possibly hundreds of Arduino compatible boards, and the other pieces of the puzzle are more important. Arduino is the Python of microcontroller development.
Come for the odd little microcontroller board. Stay for the community.
> 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 exactly what people feared. A stunning lack of long-term commitment from Intel to develop and grow a community, leaving anyone that actually built products based on their devices holding a useless bag.
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.
I wonder if even inside the hobbyist space, Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices.
Basically, if you already got the skills to work with "bare" microcontrollers, you won't need all the simplification and handholding that Arduino provides and you can just buy the individual chips and fully utilize the tiny form factor and low power requirements.
If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then locking yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably counterproductive.
On the other hand, if you do want to just combine different ready-made modules, focus on programming and don't want to worry too much on the low-level stuff, you will probably use a raspberry pi or similar: The form factor is only slightly larger than an arduino, but you get a full-fledged PC instead of a microcontroller.
So I don't really see a niche there.
> Arduino got obsoleted by the Raspberry Pi and its clones/compatible devices.
Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who wanted automation without a steep learning curve. This was a notch below the "serious hobbyist" tier where you could save a lot of money by just buying a bare-metal version of the same chip and write some code in C (or Rust). Or the pro tier, where there's way you're paying $20+ for a glorified breakout board.
Casual DIY always had a ton of inertia. It's also the reason why every other design for an analog guitar pedal or whatever is using components that are 50 years old: ancient designs are just copied-and-pasted forever. So I don't think Arduino is dead there, although other platforms are definitely eating some of their lunch.
> Not entirely. Arduino was always targeted at the "casual DIY" segment - artists, school robotics clubs, and other folks who wanted automation without a steep learning curve.
Exactly. But my point was that this demographic would today get a more powerful and more accessible platform for their projects by buying a Raspberry Pi.
Getting a full-fledged PC is an anti-feature for a small project. I don't want to fart around with a Linux install just to set the thing up. I don't want to worry about SD card longevity or power supply compatibility. And I definitely don't want to spend $50+. I'll buy a cheap Arduino-compatible board that will immediately run whatever code I load it with. I've built several Arduino projects and RPi would have been more annoying and much more expensive.
The RPi Pico looks great for this, but that's pretty much an Arduino equivalent. You can even used the Arduino IDE with it.
I feel like the raspberry pi pico is more of a competitor to the arduino than the raspberry pi - there's quite a few applications where having a whole linux operating system is a hindrance compared to running on bare metal, especially anything that needs real time control of signals. (Although you can get around this on the pi by connecting peripherals via USB/serial/i2c which themselves might use MCUs).
Then again, one of the more accessible (IMO) ways of using pi picos is with the arduino environment, or its cousin platformio. I do think that even if in some ways the arduino abstractions can be limiting in some ways, in practice it's often a big timesaver for more casual (and not so casual) applications. It gives you easy access to a large ecosystem of libraries across a lot of hardware platforms.
Perspective: Former college robotics team member a while ago (2022) (IEEE SoutheastCon)
I definitely see niches for both. Even if you've got some experience an Arduino uno or mega is just an atMEGA with good software support and IO headers.
We'd usually use an RPI and Arduino - connect our 'out of the box' modules to the pi, pi to arduino via uart serial, and wire arduino to the meat and potatoes. The RPI's IO was generally not as good in terms of latency but also if the wrong wire gets crossed suddenly we'd have a dead Pi but the Arduino would shrug it off.
> If you want to learn programming microcontrollers, then locking yourself into Arduino's abstractions is probably counterproductive.
Arduino isn't a pipeline from zero to professional embedded dev. It's a stepping stone, and a crucial one at that. I'd know. I'm an embedded firmware engineer. Got my first Arduino when I was 11.
Arduino's success comes from the legibility of their API and the simplicity of their tooling. It allows kids or a novice to get comfortable with core principles of the trade (GPIO, other basic peripherals, limited memory, etc) without the cognitive overhead of makefiles and JTAG adapters. You aren't getting "locked in" by anything, you're building skills that you'll need for the next step.
If all you're doing is twiddling some GPIOs, as is the case with most beginner/educational projects, RPi isn't teaching you any skills that translate to industry. So there's one niche: Arduino is a practical educational tool.
That simple tooling and API also make Arduino great for small side projects that don't demand a sophisticated uC. Once that project is finished, you can plop an ATMega328 onto a piece of perfboard with a crystal and a couple caps, and your Arduino is free to use on whatever your next project will be. Can't do that with a Pi.
Also, I'd much rather just plug an Arduino into my PC and throw some code on it, than clear off half my desk to make way for a monitor and keyboard for the Pi. Point Arduino.
> I suspect there was an internal deck saying how this acquisition is going to give them foothold in the hobby community,
No. This is to give them a foothold in the "IoT hammer" manufacturing business. They looked at how the Raspberry Pi went from cheap hobby computer running Linux to low effort rapid prototyping embedded platform that can run a full web stack. They want to be part of a full dev pipeline from prototype to product.
The real target audience are people building things who don't care how it works as long as it works. So expect 99.9% of these projects to use some sort of Python or JS thing running in a container on the Linux while the microcontroller runs a few lines of c to manipulate IO pin state from the Linux thing. Just like all those abandoned Spin scooters in Seattle that had raspberry Pi's in them. That is the market they are after, not the person who builds a one-off Arduino fish feeder.
I agree. The Arduino brand isn't for professionals.
But let's say tomorrow they come together with bundle/partnerships to create a new, great dev environment, very easy, that a mechanical engineer can prototype a great robot for a niche use case,and continue to use that chip and code, with some changes in V1 production ?
Is there value to the Arduino brand and community than ?
Arduino is used by many professionals. It is cheap enough that you can buy it on your corporate cards and you boss won't ask many questions. As such many products start with an Ardunio based demo, and if/when the demo is a success it moves to a real company project with a real budget.
The question though is does this add value for the owners of Arduino? All too often when a project moves from the demo to real engineering (making a demo something you can sell is typically about ten times harder than the demo) you select all new hardware.
There is a whole lot of commerical products built out of what we consider hobby projects (Adruino, Raspberry Pi). Eg: digital displays, industrial equipment controllers etc. All of this is clubbed under the nebulous IoT moniker.
My take: Qualcomm hopes to leverage Adriano adoption to expand their IoT share, and also to grow Adruino's footprint to include more smart IoT devices using Qualcomm's chipsets (Eg: Robotics)
I think it might be related to them charging say $100 instead of $5 for the device and providing "lifetime" (read: "indefinite") access to their IoT Cloud. Except there are no guarantees on the duration of that access.
As a side note, I don't get why they can't find the NPV of actually lifetime cloud compute. Compute costs are decreasing rapidly, so a $5/yr perpetuity has a NPV of $185 assuming 2.7% inflation?
> And if you're doing serious AI, you basically go for a real computer with real computing power, and in that segment, the Arduino brand means nothing.
What about cheap AI for toys and gadgets? Maybe the next Furby or some smart Toaster could run on their chips. AI is spreading, moving into casual corners outside of hobbyists and high professionals, maybe they aim to get a foothold there?
>If you're doing cheap IoT trinkets, you're never going to pay extra for a brand. You're going to buy the cheapest wifi / BT chipset out there and make do with that.
It's the opposite of that. Hobbyist/low volume maker gonna spend extra money to buy a familar tool, instead of going extra miles finding the cheapest available.
Even ESP32 is bad in term of perfomance/features and how much it cost.
Maybe. New people means new perspective. Maybe they see value in an ecosystem of developers who are keen to spend their free time to drum up interesting content, based on their projects and applications. This grassroots interest is what drove Apple to displace Sun Microsystems as the de facto, UNIX system.
I mean, if you have seen RasPi prices lately, I'm not so sure this is true. Seems like a really profitable biz..granted, I wouldn't pay their absurd prices for such underpowered hardware. Virtually nobody should buy their $200 CM5 product for example.
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.
Are they buying it up to kill it or phase it out? Seems like corporations never do anything like this to the "good" of the community, it's always bad. I'd love to be pointed at exceptions where a megacorp bought some small relatively benevolent project and then didn't squeeze all the profit out of it and leave it for dead.
I don't think it's malicious, it's just that Qualcomm offered a big payday to people who have been working on the project for a very long time and are probably on the verge of wanting to go something else in their life. And then they're gonna force them to navigate the Kafkaesque bureaucracy at BigCo to get an approval for every blog post, conference talk, etc. Expense reports, headcount planning, performance management, you name it. After a year or two, they're gonna be thoroughly cooked and leave.
I would guess they want to keep it - there are a lot of company advanced engineering projects run on Arduino and when those prove useful (most don't) the company starts looking for how to make it production. Thus having Arduino as a push to their chips is a useful in to more companies.
Of course companies change directions all the time. I wouldn't surprise me if the people who bought Arduino believe the above vision, but there are other political factions that will try to kill it.
Google bought Android, but did not kill it. Same with YouTube. But, I admit, there are a lot more examples of the other way...
Yeah it's not totally dead. But they definitely killed what made Android great. Now it might as well just be iOS. Same boring ass phones that do nothing well but install spyware apps, consume content and scroll through social media. Just more trash for the landfill.
Killing Arduino doesn't serve their interests based how many as-like boards there are. This is more akin to Microsoft's acquisition of Minecraft. Quick and easy way to get people in the door through recognition and a large user base.
I only feel dread when I see a Qualcomm story on HN anymore.
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 Summit. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 they claim to be the world’s fastest mobile SoC.
Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm - iPhone 17 Pro Max relies on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 Modem for 5G - 5G Edge solutions for RAN, presumably harnessing AI - Non-Terrestrial 5G Provisioning in their partnerships with Thales/Ericsson. - IoT and Wearables - presumably low power/footprint modems
> They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips.
As an aside, wonder how this will impact Qualcomm's RISC-V plans? They were apparently working on some RISC-V cores, but I wonder whether that was just a play to put pressure on Arm, or are they still planning on bringing those out to market?
(The "Arduino UNO Q" that they're launching now is based on a Cortex A53. One would think if they're serious about RISC-V they would start with this kind of things, as in low-end stuff for tinkerers.)
> If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
They have to fix their approach to Linux driver development. (and driver development in general).
Qualcomm likes to lob hardware to consumers while spending the minimal amount of time making sure the drivers to support that hardware actually works.
I couldn't imagine someone like Valve leaping at the opportunity to use them.
>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.
I think the AI bit is overblown. Why does every large company have to do everything in technology, AI is horribly over valued in the market right now. The other issues are much more important as those are threats to Qcom's current profit method mostly MediaTek squeezing the lower tier market. It's unclear if Qcoms going to be able to dominate upper tier where they own like 60% of market share if they don't also compete at lower tier where MediaTek has been very successful
The honest answer is that they see AI interaction as being the next human to computer interface, one that will function much in the way that super-apps do today, with the benefit of accelerating the purchasing pathway.
In a way this mirrors how people opt for using apps even though a web version exists, because the apps are generally more performant.
I'd argue that ChatGPT is already there. The instant check out feature they've added, along with integrations was that crucial link between recommending and fulfilling a purchase. It turns ChatGPT into something that can very directly assist with typical "life stuff".
As examples: You're having a dinner party, it can set the menu, then buy the ingredients. At christmas, spend a few minutes talking about your kids and then it can make christmas gift suggestions and go and buy it for you, then do it again 12 months later.
Getting between the consumer and their purchases would be highly lucrative, it functionally replaces one of the core functions of advertising and retail.
"With the money they earn, they can buy more police and political power. Then they come after us. We have the unions and gambling, and they're the best things to have, but narcotics is the thing of the future. If we don't get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. Not now, but in ten years".
-- Tom Hagen
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.
The gap between Google’s and Apple’s SoCs is insane. Current Pixels bench at around a third of what current iPhones do.
Not that performance matters to all users, but with how much Pixels cost you have to ask yourself what it is you’re paying for. Even if you don’t care for Apple, for a little more you can get a competitor for a Snapdragon.
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 concerning pricing and budgeting. its a smart long term move, and i think the industry is going to continue to push towards consolidation and in-housing.
Qualcomm is and will remain patent holding company. They have a crazy number patents for all manner of wireless communication, and they treat them like their golden geese.
So they're basically going to become a patent troll, like IBM?
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.
I've been out of the hardware game a minute but Qualcomm was a great partner for helping you ship products. Everything about them sucks, but they will actually send engineers to your office. They always took bug reports seriously and pretty much always delivered patches. Also they always had ample samples, both in terms of dev boards and software. I know of several products that basically shipped the sample code with minimal modifications.
If I were a company trying to ship V1 of our first product, I would hands down pick Qualcomm. MediaTek et al are great for when you know what you're doing with minimal handholding.
I absolutely hated working with them, but at least they were a vendor you could work with. Perhaps the cheaper vendors have upped their game here but I wouldn't know.
I heard that Qualcomm can be decent to work with - if you are in a company the size of Qualcomm, or can dangle "500000 units to ship" in front of them like a carrot.
But "decent" is Qualcomm at its absolute best. And Qualcomm at its worst?
I'd rather chew down broken glass than work with Qualcomm.
Qualcomm still are the only relevant ones in town who actually sell high performance ARM designs to third parties and have no political quarrels attached, there's a lot of money to be made in that game.
As you said there is competition from Mediatek, but who knows how long Mediatek has before the US government sanctions them to hell and beyond. Apple doesn't sell to third parties (no matter how much one might dream) and so does Google. Samsung I haven't ever seen used outside of their own phones and TVs.
The remainder is NVidia's Tegra lineup but other than automotive and the Nintendo Switch I haven't seen these in third party products either, I doubt they'll even take your calls if you are not coming in with millions of units sold of demand.
Cooked how exactly? - Completely missed out on the LLM boom, just like everyone except nvidia. - Apple never used qcom SoCs, just their modems, Google doesn't even register on the radar of sales, their first foray into SoCs isn't great. - Idk where you get that, they still hold the entire market in their firm grasp and Nuvia stuff has been nothing but outstanding, it's just a shame that MS are cowards and dropped the Windows-on-Arm stuff again. - Google are partnering with them for the Android on PC projects.
I hope they provide better Linux support for the next gen PC grade chips.
But intel being "cooked" was a massive psyop. how was intel ever "cooked", when they were still designing, taping out, and delivering massive quantities of CPUs to DCs and consumer products?
AMD briefly gave them a run for their money, but it was nowhere near the catastrophe that bulldozer was, where the company basically needed rescuing. For a brief moment, they weren't a monopolist - that's all that happened, right?
AMD being circled by OpenAI makes sense since AMD makes NVidia knockoffs. that's objectively useful. Harddrive company make sense for storing weights and generative content. Marvell is networking...
what does QCOm present here, that openai or the AI scene at large needs? the only bet is robotics - but why on earth would I put some washed-up adreno into a 40kg man-sized apparatus which would very comfortably fit a H100?
Intel was in danger because they went from having massive amounts of cash on hand to losing billions per quarter with no roadmap to retake the market in the face of competition from both AMD and ARM. They also didn't have competitive GPUs, they lost the automotive market, they lost the networking market outside of desktop/laptop WiFi, and they'd lost any potential market in handhelds/embedded ages ago. Intel is a company that is massively capital intensive, and they simply cannot afford to be in that position. Looking at the need for billions in investment while burning billions per quarter and no good pathway to profitability, investors leave and the company is forced to make dramatic cuts which furthers the death spiral.
I don't think OpenAI has any plans to buy AMD. That's just another moving paper around and we all get rich in the AI space - like the nVidia, OpenAI, Oracle circle of funding.
You should feel dread. They're a pretty awful company... one of those outfits that seems to employ more lawyers than engineers. Basically the Oracle of chips.
I can't begin to guess what motivated them to engage in an intentional culture clash of this magnitude.
If you want to use SOTA camera sensors on an embedded system Qualcomm is great (in particular compared to NVIDA Jetson).
Additionally, 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.
Alternatives like the Pi RP2040/2350 and Espressif's vast selection of boards can fill the gaps, but Arduino was what got me and many people I know into microcontrollers, so I have a special fondness for them!
[1] https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q