Edge AI development boards keep climbing the performance curve, and Thundercomm has just dropped one of the more capable options yet. The TurboX C7790 Development Kit is built around a Qualcomm Dragonwing Q-7790 (CQ7790S) system-on-module and ships with both Android and Linux board support packages, putting 24 TOPS of INT8 inference inside a 160 x 124 x 20.5 mm (6.3 x 4.9 x 0.8 inches) carrier board aimed at robotics, AI cameras, and edge gateways.

The heart of the kit is the SOM itself, which carries a 4nm Dragonwing Q-7790 with an octa-core Kryo CPU (1x Gold+ at 2.8 GHz, 4x Gold at 2.4 GHz, 3x Silver at 1.8 GHz), an Adreno 722 GPU clocked up to 1.15 GHz, and a Hexagon-derived NPU block (NSP3, 8K HMX, 4x HVX) that delivers the headline 24 TOPS figure. Onboard memory is fixed at 12GB LPDDR5X with 128GB of flash, and the video pipeline handles 4K120 decode for H.264, H.265, and AV1 plus 4K60 encode for H.264 and H.265. An always-on audio DSP with an embedded NPU5 handles low-power keyword and event detection.

The carrier board leans heavily on machine-vision use cases. Three 4-lane MIPI D-PHY camera connectors support a triple-ISP configuration up to 21MP per sensor, with an additional HDMI input for capture work and dual HDMI outputs (one muxed against the MIPI DSI connector). Networking covers two RJ45 gigabit ports plus an M.2 E-key slot for optional Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, while storage expands through an M.2 M-key NVMe slot and a microSD reader. Rounding out the I/O are four USB 3.0 Type-A ports, a USB 3.1 Type-C port, a 40-pin expansion header, onboard accelerometer, gyro, and e-compass sensors, four digital microphones, and a 12V DC barrel jack feeding the board across a -30°C to +75°C operating range.

For anyone hoping to drop this onto a vanilla Debian image, the access story is less open than the spec sheet suggests. Thundercomm gates the Android and Linux BSPs behind an approved account and its TurboX SDK Manager, with 3D models and schematics requiring an NDA and a Qualcomm PKLA agreement for core source code. That mirrors how most Qualcomm-based SOMs reach the market, and mainline Linux support for the Dragonwing family is still tracked through Linaro's Qualcomm Landing Team work upstreaming Snapdragon and IoT SoC drivers rather than landing as drop-in distro support on day one. The upstream kernel infrastructure for Qualcomm Hexagon DSPs is itself still maturing: Qualcomm posted RFC patches in February 2026 for a new DSP Accelerator (QDA) driver targeting the Linux kernel's accelerator subsystem and covering all Hexagon DSP domains across Qualcomm SoCs, complemented by an open-source FastRPC user-space library Qualcomm maintains on GitHub for DSP communication.

The kit is listed at $1,499 (€1,380) and ships with the SOM pre-mounted to the carrier, a Sony IMX577 camera module with ribbon cable, two external speakers, a USB Type-A to Type-C cable, and a 12V power adapter (omitted for Japanese orders due to local regulations). Further specifications and ordering details are on the Thundercomm press release.