Qualcomm Dragonwing Q-2390 Brings 1.1 TOPS to AIoT

Two New Dragonwing Parts, Aimed Low and Wide

Qualcomm announced the Dragonwing Q-2390 and IQ-2390 on September 1, 2026, ahead of IFA in Berlin. Both are highly integrated platforms for what the company calls the intelligent edge, and both are pitched at the segment below the headline-grabbing 100-TOPS modules — the appliances, panels and controllers that need a little AI rather than a lot of it.

The two parts share silicon and differ in target market. The Q-2390 goes into retail terminals, smart home devices, smart displays and enterprise edge gear. The IQ-2390 is the industrial sibling, aimed at automation, machine vision, building management and energy systems.

• Quad-core CPU — one Arm Cortex-A78 at up to 1.5 or 1.9 GHz plus three Cortex-A55 cores at matching clocks, with an optional SiFive E61 RISC-V real-time core
• 1.1 TOPS NPU, alongside an Adreno 704 GPU at 1.1 GHz and a Hexagon V66 audio DSP
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet with TSN, WiFi 5, Bluetooth 5.0/5.1 and optional 4G LTE
• Longevity through 2036, with evaluation kits expected in Q1 2027

Why 1.1 TOPS Is the Right Number for This Job

It is easy to read a single-digit TOPS figure as a disappointment when 100 TOPS SMARC modules exist. That misreads what these parts are for. A thermostat classifying occupancy, a retail display detecting whether anyone is standing in front of it, or a machine-vision camera doing defect detection on a known part does not need a language model. It needs a small convolutional network running reliably on a few watts, and 1.1 TOPS covers that comfortably.

What you buy at this tier is integration. Dual Gigabit Ethernet with time-sensitive networking on the same die as the NPU removes a switch and a controller from the bill of materials. The optional RISC-V real-time core handles deterministic control loops without a second microcontroller on the board. For a product team, those subtractions are worth more than raw throughput.

Qualcomm has been steadily filling in this portfolio. We covered the AAEON uCOM-Q6490 putting 12 TOPS on a SMARC 2.1 module in August, and Qualcomm's upstream-first Linux 2.0 push for Dragonwing in June — which is arguably the more important part of the story for anyone who has fought a vendor kernel.

What Does Longevity Through 2036 Buy You?

A ten-year availability commitment is the specification that industrial buyers read first and consumer readers skip entirely. Designing a building-management controller or a factory sensor is a multi-year exercise, and the product then sits in service for a decade. A processor that disappears in three years turns that into a forced redesign.

Software support matters as much as supply. Qualcomm lists Android, Yocto Linux and Ubuntu across both parts, with Zephyr RTOS for the RISC-V variants. That is a broad enough spread to cover both a touchscreen appliance and a headless industrial node from the same silicon.

Pricing has not been disclosed, and evaluation kits are not due until Q1 2027, so this is an announcement to file rather than act on. Qualcomm says customer engagement is already running through an early access programme, and the system-on-modules will be on show at IFA.

For the rest of the edge silicon picture, our mini computer coverage tracks how much AI capability keeps arriving at each price and power tier.

Sources: CNX Software — September 1, 2026; Qualcomm announcement coverage via Zonamovilidad — September 1, 2026.