There is a war chest in San Diego and no, its not part of the Navy or SAIC (News - Alert); it belongs to Qualcomm, which is clear about the goal to expand its developer market and reach deeper into the enterprise. In previous articles we have talked about Qualcomm’s (News - Alert) acquisition of Edge Impulse. This time it’s a “partnership.”
Strategically, Canonical, the developer of Ubuntu Linux has brought its desktop and server environments to Dragonwing. More specifically, “This public beta enables the full Ubuntu Desktop experience on the Qualcomm Dragonwing QCS6490 and QCS5430 processors and complements existing Ubuntu (News - Alert) Server support with significant enhancements. Together, these updates provide a powerful development environment for building next-generation AI-driven edge applications.” (You might want to contemplate the article about serverless solutions while reading this.)
Essentially, they’re bringing that full, familiar desktop experience right to the intelligent edge, which wemans it’s aimed at capturing the imagination of both hardware and software developers. This partnership reaches deeper into the hardware design to attract industrial and embedded IoT solutions. A key ingredient is the goal of reaching the intelligent edge, where NVIDIA (News - Alert) dominates currently.
Developers can optimize both hardware and software utilizing AI models with Qualcomm AI Hub and leverage advanced features on the Qualcomm IoT platforms. Developers can select between upstream open source or optimized drivers based on their requirements. The bottom line is that using the Ubuntu on Qualcomm’s IoT platforms delivers scale and speed to edge.
This strategic collaboration delivers Ubuntu images specifically for Qualcomm IoT platforms. This initiative is designed to cater to a wide array of device applications at the intelligent edge.
For ODMs and OEMs, a validated Ubuntu stack on Qualcomm Dragonwing IoT hardware can reduce time to market and integration complexities. Canonical’s enterprise support offerings also ensure ODM/OEM partners can deliver production-grade solutions with confidence, backed by security updates and long-term maintenance.
As Ryan Daws writes, “The whole point is to unleash proper AI horsepower directly on edge devices. Think of advanced graphics, smooth multimedia playback, and efficient on-device machine learning all bundled into one platform making it much easier to build next-gen applications.
Another aspect of the commitment is that Canonical’s confirmed that fully certified, production-ready versions of these Ubuntu 24.04 images are on the roadmap. Crucially, these will come with long-term support (LTS) and ongoing maintenance, which is necessary for industrial and enterprise deployments.
It’s clear that the negotiations between Canonical with Ubuntu and Qualcomm with Dragonwing started before Dragonwing was announced in February, because the beta is accessible now. If you have a Qualcomm Dragonwing RB3 Gen2 Vision or the RB3 Gen2 Lite Vision kit, you are ready to program and test your concepts.
“This release is a significant step towards delivering the full Ubuntu experience on our intelligent edge,” said Pragya Pathi, Director of Product Management at Qualcomm. “By enabling Ubuntu Desktop and Server on the Dragonwing reference boards hardware, we’re empowering developers to build and deploy next-generation IoT solutions across a wide range of edge use cases.”
While this is not the first time Ubuntu has been paired with Qualcomm, it comes with the Ubuntu desktop environment, making edge solutions much more user-friendly with better UI capabilities even on systems out in the field.
This combination of Ubuntu Desktop familiarity and Qualcomm Dragonwing silicon muscle really opens the door for a new wave of AI-powered edge devices. Making the edge this intelligent means that applications can process on the edge without accessing the cloud.
The release also supports new hardware.
These improvements mean developers get to harness the power of the hardware using Ubuntu Desktop or Server, all within a secure and flexible Linux environment that most are already comfortable with.
The Bottom line is Qualcomm is making the commitment to reach out to edge compute AIoT developers, and it probably couldn’t come at better time.