Qualcomm To Bring Custom CPU Used For Snapdragon X Chips To Industrial PCs

The move stems from Qualcomm’s $1.4 billion acquisition of chip design startup Nuvia in 2021, a deal that has supported ongoing efforts to diversify its business beyond mobile chipsets by giving it powerful custom CPU designs based on the Arm instruction set architecture.

Qualcomm announced Thursday that it’s bringing the custom, Arm-compatible CPU used for its Snapdragon X Series chips to a new lineup of processors for industrial PCs.

Set to debut in industrial PCs in the coming months, the new Dragonwing IQ-X Series packs Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU along with a GPU and NPU inside a “ruggedized” system-on-chip package that can withstand extreme temperatures from -40 degrees to 221 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the San Diego-based company.

The move stems from Qualcomm’s $1.4 billion acquisition of chip design startup Nuvia in 2021. The deal has supported the company’s ongoing efforts to diversify its business beyond mobile chipsets by giving it powerful custom CPU designs based on the Arm instruction set architecture. The company has been executing on its plan to integrate these custom CPU designs into products across different segment lines, starting last year with the Snapdragon X Series chips for Windows PCs.

Qualcomm said these are the “first industrial-grade PC processors engineered to accelerate smart manufacturing across devices,” including box PCs, panel PCs, edge controllers, advanced human-machine interfaces and programmable logic controllers.

OEMs set to release devices with the Dragonwing IQ-X Series include Advantech, Congatec, Nexcom, Portwell, Tria Technologies and SECO.

In a briefing with journalists, Anand Venkatesan, senior director of product management at Qualcomm, said the Dragonwing IQ-X series is a “single, monolithic platform” designed to eliminate the need for partners and customers to make “very difficult tradeoffs” in systems.

“Either it is speed in terms of single-thread performance or power savings or it is I/O flexibility, which is a tradeoff for lower cost,” he said earlier in the week.

Marking the first Dragonwing IQ chips with a custom CPU design, the processors scale from eight to 12 cores, with the maximum frequency on a single thread reaching 3.4GHz, offering what the company called “best-in-class” single- and multi-threaded performance. The NPU will offer 45 trillion operations per second across the lineup.

With support for the Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC operating system, the processors support a “range of industry-leading software, middleware and applications,” including Qt Codesys, Ethercat and “other powerful tools,” Qualcomm said.

The company is pushing the NPU as a way to accelerate AI workloads for industrial solutions, saying that developers can do so using the Qualcomm AI Software Stack as well as common runtimes like ONNX and PyTorch.

The Dragonwing IQ-X Series is designed to support industry-standard COM module form factors for “drop-in replacement on existing carrier boards” as well “standard hardware peripherals and bridge chips used in the industry,” according to the company.

Qualcomm said the Dragonwing IQ-X Series can reduce the bill of materials for partners and customers building systems by eliminating the need for external AI accelerators or multimedia modules due to the integration of such features within the chips.

Venkatesan told CRN that the processors will be supported by the Qualcomm Partner Network program, calling systems integrators a significant part of the company’s go-to-market efforts.

“They’ll play a very key role in [pushing] adoption. In fact, most of the problems of today that require edge intelligence to improve the productivity of a particular customer or a use case [are] actually coming to us from the systems integrators,” he said.