Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ processors have been powering the leading smartphones and tablets and more recently, set-top boxes and media storage devices. As such, they're designed to be both powerful, and energy-efficient.
But the applications for powerful, power-efficient processors are not limited to mobile devices. Snapdragon processors will soon power a variety of embedded computing applications including robotics, head mounted displays, medical imaging, digital signage, and multimedia systems.
The embedded community can currently leverage the DragonBoard™ development kit, System on Modules (SoM) and Single Board Computers (SBC) based on Snapdragon processors running the Android OS.
And now, the reach of Snapdragon processors for embedded applications is set to grow with the availability of Linux operating system. The beta release of the Ubuntu 14.04 distribution on the Snapdragon 600 processor was just announced with two flavors: one from Linaro and one from QR-Linux.
Linaro Member Build 14.05 features Ubuntu desktop functionality—capable of running the Gnome Shell desktop; with 720p video playback, Wi-Fi connectivity, Ethernet, and USB support. Meanwhile, the QR-Linux release is aimed at more headless, compute centric applications with Wi-Fi, multi-core support, as well as built-in power and thermal management.
One of the first supported development platforms for this Linux release is the IFC6410 single board computer available from Inforce Computing, seen below at the Qualcomm demo pod at Computex.
