After Qualcomm’s buy of Arduino it has left many questioning what market its new Uno Q board is attempting to focus on. Taking the continued RAM-pocalypse as inspiration, [Bringus Studios] made a tongue-in-cheek video about utilizing one among these SoC/MCU hybrid Arduino boards for running Linux and gaming on it. Naturally, with the dearth of ARM-native Steam video games, this meant utilizing the FEX x86-to-ARM translator along with Steam’s Proton translation layer the place no native Linux recreation exists, making for a wonderful stress take a look at of the SoC aspect of this board.
We lined this new ‘Arduino’ board beforehand, which options each a quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC and a Cortex-M33 MCU. Since it makes use of the Uno type issue, all SoC I/O goes through the one USB-C connector, which means {that a} USB-C docking station is just about required to make use of the SoC, although there’s at the least 16 GB of eMMC to put in the OS on. A Debian-based OS picture even comes preinstalled, which is handy.
With a mere 2 GB of LPDDR4 it’s not the perfect board to run desktop Linux on, however for those who’re persistent and affected person sufficient it would work, and you’ll even play 3D video video games as if it’s Qualcomm’s tackle Raspberry Pi SBCs. After some intense gaming the SoC bundle will get actually fairly toasty, so including a heatsink might be wanted if you wish to peg its cores and GPU to 100% for prolonged durations of time.
As for dodging the RAM-pocalypse with one among these $44 boards, it’s concerning the same price because the 1 GB Raspberry Pi 5, however the 2 GB RPi 5 – even with the current second value bump – might be a greater deal for this objective. Especially since you may skip the entire docking station, however dropping the eMMC is a rawer deal, and the devoted MCU might be arguably good for extra devoted functions. Still, desktop efficiency is a tough ‘meh’ on the Uno Q, even for those who’re very beneficiant.
Despite FEX being a ache to arrange, it appears to work effectively, which is promising for Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame VR glasses, that are by the way Qualcomm Snapdragon-based.