14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical and MediaTek have entered into a partnership, and they want to build multi-purpose, future-proofed home gateways and premium routers.
In parallel with the Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, another event, dubbed Embedded World Exhibition & Conference, took place in Nürnberg, Germany. As the name suggests, it was focused on embedded platforms. This is a domain where Canonical has a great presence with Snappy Ubuntu Core, so they couldn't miss it.
In fact, a couple of very important pieces of news have already arrived from Germany. First of all, Canonical has revealed that Dragonboard 410c is now their reference platform for Ubuntu Core on ARM 64-bit and that Dell's Box PC 3000 and 5000 Series are going to ship with Ubuntu.
MediaTek and Canonical are going places
Another company has announced that it plans to partner up with Canonical. MediaTek is known for its embedded solutions, and the fact that fact that they intend to have future-proofed home gateways and premium routers powered by Snappy Ubuntu Core is great news.
"Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company, MediaTek, and Canonical are joining forces to build multi-purpose, future-proofed home gateways and premium routers based on the MediaTek smart home gateways chipset and ‘snappy’ Ubuntu Core. The home gateways will be capable of adapting to the evolving demands of the smart home, thanks to the versatility and power of MediaTek’s hardware," Canonical announced.
Interestingly enough, the support for Snappy Ubuntu Core also means that the devices will have access to OTA upgrades, which should make them a lot more secure. Currently, when you buy a router, you can hope for one or two upgrades over its lifetime, but MediaTek wants its devices to be treated as a regular Linux distribution.
The first device that will receive the Ubuntu treatment is MediaTek’s ARM-based MT7623a powerful SOC targeted at the smart home gateway market. This small device also comes with Bluetooth LE, USB, Infrared, and SD card support, just to name a few.
There are no launch dates attached to the projects, but they can't be too far into the future.