Is this vaporware?

So, seeing as this board was supposed to happen months ago, and there really hasn’t been a peep about it in the better part of a year, AND its CPU is now out of date… this board isn’t actually going to happen, is it?

I will be posting uboot support (sdhci boot) for this board very soon - I also upstreamed ffmpeg v4l2 support using this SoC for testing (ie HEVC, VP9 was not present on db410c IIRC) a couple of months ago so I am pretty sure this board will see the light.

SoC updates will maintain software compatibility so I wouldn’t be too concerned about the CPU being out of date.

Qualcomm will likely not allow this board to come out until the CPU is well and truly obsolete, or the price per board is > $1000.

In other words: “no, this board is not coming.”

The board is going to happen… Obviously we’ve had a number of delays. We’re working through the last couple of issues, but expect to have it available soon.

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So, are you with Arrow? Or Linaro?
What do you mean by “soon”? Months? Weeks? I’ve been waiting on this for many months now, and have finally broken down and bought a HiKey 960 for a project I’m working on, but that board is very severely lacking in some very basic features, like GPS and sound.

I am with Arrow and responsible for our DragonBoard program. I understand your frustration. Please know that Qualcomm, Arrow and Linaro are all working to get this released as soon as possible. My expectation is that it will be “weeks” and not “months”, but won’t be more specific than that.

Thank you. I hope you’re right!

Hi Bill. Do you have any more updates on the Dragonboard 820c? It has been 6 weeks now. I hope this board is released soon!

You know something, @Oliver_Drew … believe it or not, but now that I’ve gotten into it, the Hikey 960 actually seems to be a better option. There are a whole bunch of great things in its favor;

  1. It is directly supported by AOSP MASTER,
  2. It runs fully with just one blob (for the MALI GPU), which means that you are a heck of a lot less dependent on the vendor to keep it running and up to date – just look at the Dragonboard 410C, there is no running AOSP 8 on that thing.
  3. It is actually a stronger CPU than the SD820

Hi everyone,
Just noticed that the Dragonboard 820c is now showing as a product on the Arrow website. You can’t order it but you can request a quotation.
https://www.arrow.com/en/products/dragonboard820c/arrow-development-tools

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Price is nicer than hikey960, but no Android support? That’s a real damper.

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It’s here bro! I have it. Have yours too.

yep I was wrong, and happily so.

It’s gone again! Keep wondering.

Are these actually available for purchase? There seems to be no stock, no lead time, and Arrow isn’t sending a quote despite the button on their webpage.

Is it Arrow’s intention these be usable in a real design, or is this just a technology demonstration? Given the rather sketchy history of availability and predictability I’m seeing here on this forum, how could anyone trust the supply chain enough to actually develop a product based on this board?

It’s a dev board, not an end user product. You’re supposed to use it as a shortcut for developing your product which contains many of the elements of the dev board.

Can’t find a link for the 820, but this may give you an idea: https://www.arrow.com/en/products/apq-8016e-1-760nsp-tr-010/qualcomm

That’s disappointing. I understand what development boards are; I guess I misunderstood what the DragonBoard 820c is. I figured the point of making a 96boards-compatible board was to serve the market of modest-volume designs for which an off-the-shelf module plugged into a custom baseboard makes more sense than buying and integrating a Snapdragon chip discretely.

I had hoped that, for example, as BeagleBone was to TI, these 96boards-compatible DragonBoards were to Qualcomm. Sadly, that seems wrong. Too bad; I imagine there’s an underserved market there above the hobbyist, but below those who can afford to design-in a chip of this complexity and make a quarter-million dollar minimum buy.

I’m not sure I agree with that. There are other boards that are much more geared to the end user or hacker, like hikey[960], which in many ways is a much nicer setup for a hacker than going through the Qualcomm bloat.

It’s back to vaporware status.
It looks like nobody cares to provide sufficient supplies of this great dev board.
How sad!