Before I clicked I expected a single SoC with a hybrid architecture (powerful cores to run Linux, MCU cores for real time control). This is a board with two physically separate chips. They put an MCU next to the quad-core application chip.
It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.
> It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.
Would not be surprised to see both approaches to developing only for one of the two systems: programming the MCU and deploying some ready-made stuff to the big Qualcomm chip, like a stacking a shield on top of the Uno only that the shield is software-defined (providing some compute service), and running some ready-made interface abstraction on the MCU, running everything individually programmed on the powerful Linux chip. Likely within some form of JVM or a Python runtime, or node.
> It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.
If history is any indication: they won't. See the previous Arduino Linux + MCU systems like Arduino Yún and Tian, for example, or the FPGA-based Arduino MKR Vidor - Arduino's approach has generally been to throw hardware over the wall with a bit of example code and hope the community can come up with a use for it.
It will be interesting to see how they make this arrangement approachable for Arduino’s audience which generally expects ease of use to be a high priority.