Something interesting is happening in the maker and embedded computing world. Qualcomm's acquisition of Arduino initially looked like a strategic business move. But the products that followed make the bigger picture much clearer. The Arduino UNO Q combines Qualcomm Dragonwing compute with a real-time STM32 MCU and Linux, while supporting AI models through Arduino App Lab. And now we have the VENTUNO Q, built around Qualcomm's Dragonwing IQ-8275 and explicitly targeting Edge AI, robotics and Physical AI. At the same time, Raspberry Pi 6 has been pushed out to no earlier than early 2028, and a dedicated NPU is not currently expected.
This creates an interesting gap.
Raspberry Pi has dominated the hobbyist and maker SBC space for years because it offered an excellent combination of Linux, community, ecosystem and affordability. But AI is changing what people expect from an edge computing board. CPU + GPU + memory is no longer the whole story. AI acceleration, heterogeneous processing, real-time control, cameras, sensors, connectivity and an optimized software stack are becoming equally important.
And there is another player to watch: Espressif.
Its move toward higher-performance RISC-V-based SoCs, such as the ESP32-P4 with AI-oriented instruction extensions, shows that RISC-V is also moving beyond the traditional microcontroller space toward increasingly capable Edge AI platforms.
So the competition is no longer simply: Arduino vs Raspberry Pi
It is becoming:
ARM + NPU
vs
RISC-V + AI acceleration
vs
heterogeneous CPU + MCU architectures.
For makers and embedded engineers, this could be a very interesting next few years. The Raspberry Pi ecosystem is still incredibly strong. But when it comes to Edge AI, robotics and Physical AI, the definition of a "maker board" is clearly changing. The next generation of boards may not just help us build things. They may actually be able to see, hear, reason and act locally. That is a significant shift for the embedded world.