Thundercomm's RUBIK Pi 3 Edge AI Board, Developed with Qualcomm, Goes on Sale for $179

Thundercomm, a joint venture between ThunderSoft and Qualcomm Technologies, has officially launched the RUBIK Pi, a single-board computer-style device targeting on-device artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workloads powered by the Qualcomm QCS6490 system-on-chip — and it's gained a numerical suffix in support of a few design tweaks since its unveiling, becoming the RUBIK Pi 3.

"RUBIK Pi 3 is a major milestone for Thundercomm in on-device AI," claims Thundercomm's Pier Zhang of the new gadget's general availability, announced during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. "It's not just high-performance hardware — it's an accelerator for innovation, empowering developers and enterprises to bring ideas to life and enhance efficiency."

"Qualcomm Technologies is committed to delivering cutting-edge computing capabilities for developers," adds Qualcomm's Manvinder Singh of the partnership between the two companies to bring the device to market. "Powered by the Qualcomm QCS6490 processor, RUBIK Pi 3 showcases the possibilities of on-device AI. We look forward to working with Thundercomm to foster a thriving global developer ecosystem."

Thundercomm unveiled the original RUBIK Pi back in October last year, promising to open pre-orders in November for what became an limited-run "early bird" release. Some hardware tweaks to the design, which is a system-on-module mounted to a carrier board rather than a true single-board computer, followed — keeping the base specifications fully intact but delivering minor quality-of-life tweaks based on feedback from early adopters.

Like the original, the RUBIK Pi 3 is powered by Qualcomm's QCS6490 system-on-chip — giving it Kryo 670 processor with four Arm Cortex-A78 and four Cortex-A55 cores, with only one Cortex-A78 core reaching the maximum 2.7GHz clock speed, an Adreno 643L graphics processor running at up to 821MHz, and a Hexagon machine learning accelerator capable of delivering up to 12 tera-operations per second (TOPS) of dense minimum-precision compute for on-device artificial intelligence.

To this, Thundercomm has added includes 8GB of LPDDR4x RAM and 128GB of on-board storage and a carrier that breaks out ports including a 4k30-capable HDMI 1.4 display output, a 4k60-capable USB Type-C connector with DisplayPort, two MIPI Camera Serial Interfaces, gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, an M.2 M-key slot, and a Raspberry Pi-style 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, plus a module for Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless connectivity.

The company has also been hard at work on the software side of things, broadening compatibility: the RUBIK Pi 3, Thundercom, says, now supports an alpha build of Google's Android 13 operating system as well as an early access Debian Linux image, on top of its existing support for Qualcomm Linux. There's also compatibility with "selected models" from Qualcomm's AI Hub model zoo, and the promise of the board being "fully compatible with Raspberry Pi 5 official accessories."

Thundercomm is showcasing the RUBIK Pi 3 at the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week, with demos including driving a robotic hand while performing color perception, face detection, and gesture recognition tasks — including the ability to challenge visitors to a game of rock-paper-scissors — and a RUBIC Pi 3-powered Polaroid camera featuring an on-device vision language model (VLM) for image analysis. A third demo shows the board running four models from the Qualcomm AI hub simultaneously: image classification, object detection, pose detection, and image segmentation.

The Rubic Pi 3 is now available to order from the Thundercomm website at $179; a small number of "beta version" boards were still available at the time of writing, at a discounted $159.