Qualcomm is a piece of shit supplier to anyone trying to innovate on the edge, especially startups.
My client is trying to buying ~500,000 of SoCs and wants them to be American because patriotism.
Instead Qualcomm has them waiting months to even get pricing, just to be quoted with 80% margins at lead times that are not competitive with overseas suppliers.
They're about to ship the M1: 37g, IMU, Camera, NPU, CPU, WiFi/BT, entirely hardware synchronized and designed for mass-manufacturing.
Hundreds of thousands pre-ordered, scaling to millions, for next-gen devices for robotics, automotive, night vision...
Client wants to build American but the way Qualcomm is engaging right now means we have to keep building perception and compute systems with overseas suppliers.
Mediatek priced it better and more competitive lead times.
The China suppliers such as Rockchip are even faster but cant do that.