Antmicro has introduced a new open source baseboard powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor and featuring support for WiFi, Bluetooth, and a whole bunch of I/O options. The company says the idea is to deliver an open and royalty-free platform that can be used to build anything from smart displays or kiosks to portable computing devices.
While pricing and availability details aren’t available yet, Antmicro has spelled out some of the key details in a blog post, and schematics and other info are available in a GitHub repository.
For reference, Antmicro already has a similar baseboard designed to work with NVIDIA Jetson modules. That version sells for $300 (not including the price of a compatible Jetson system-on-a-module).
The new Qualcomm version is designed to work as a carrier board for a Quectel SA800U module that features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor with Adreno 630 graphics, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and support for WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0.
Antmicro’s board also brings a Gigabit Ethernet port to the table, as well as HDMI, USB 3.1 and USB 3.0 Type-C ports, a microSD card reader, an M.2 connector for an optional SSD, and two 4-lane MIPI CSI-2 camera interfaces. There’s support for Power over Ethernet and USB-C power delivery, or you can power the device with an external power supply or even a battery.
While Antmicro says SA800U module ships with Android 9 or Android 10 pre-installed, and that most of the I/O interfaces on the baseboard will be supported as soon as you attach the module to the board.
It’s also interesting to note that independent developers have been working to bring support for the Snapdragon 845 processor to the mainline Linux kernel in recent years, which could open the possibility of running other Linux-based operating systems on the board. Heck, you might even be able to run Windows 11 on it. But it’s unclear if you’ll get full access to the chip’s hardware-accelerated graphics, digital signal processor, and other features that Antmicro says makes the chip a good fit for AI applications if you’re running anything other than Android.
via @konradybcio and @Antmicro
I prefer a raspberry pi format