Linaro at FOSDEM 2024
linaro.org
linaro.org
When I was working at QCOM in 2012 we were all excited for a Snapdragon based Raspberry Pi-like SBC since the CPUs were much more powerful than the Broadcomm BCM2835. We kept asking our internal R&D teams for something equivalent and ended up with repurposed cell phone testing hardware that only ran a heavily modified version of Android.
QCOM eventually partnered with Inforce to make the IFC SBCs[1], which had some nice features like 1gig Ethernet and SATA, but they ran heavily customized Android and Linux. The boards I have are still functional but the OS is forever stuck in 2013 and impossible to update.
We were part of the server management group that procured ran and deployed hardware and operating systems to our datacenters. When we tried to give feedback all we got was silence or "well customers don't need that" when here we were the exact customers that would purchase them.
Eventually they released Centriq [2] which landed with a dull thud.
QCOM had a huge opportunity here, but due to all the corporate politics about who would "own" the product and focusing on trying to run Android, Linux, and Windows on these devices they never managed to pull it off. Classic example of completely not understanding the target market or listening to customers, and now companies like Ampere and Annapurna Labs are eating their lunch.
1. https://www.electronicspecifier.com/products/communications/...
Of the 7 chips that are actually stocked, none seems to have a publicly available datasheet.