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.

News source: Qualcomm To Bring Custom CPU Used For Snapdragon X Chips To Industrial PCs
Image source: Images of Qualcomm | Qualcomm