Canonical announces new optimized Ubuntu image for Thundercomm RUBIK Pi 3 (canonical.com)

Canonical has released an optimized, pre‑installed Ubuntu image for the Thundercomm RUBIK Pi 3 developer board, which runs on Qualcomm’s Dragonwing QCS6490. The image is available for download and ships preloaded on new boards, bringing Canonical’s long‑term support, security updates, and Ubuntu’s ecosystem to a low‑power edge AI platform. Canonical and Thundercomm position the integration as a way to shorten time‑to‑market by delivering out‑of‑the‑box functionality, hardware‑tuned performance, and an integrated software stack. Technically, RUBIK Pi 3 pairs a 12 TOPS ML accelerator, an 8‑core GPU, 8 GB LPDDR4x, 128 GB UFS 2.2 storage, integrated Wi‑Fi/Bluetooth and sub‑6.5 W power draw with access to Qualcomm AI Hub (pre‑optimized vision, audio, NLP models), Edge Impulse MLOps, IMSDK and QIRP SDK (ROS/ROS2), containerized SDKs with NPU/GPU/VZPU acceleration, and VSCode device extensions. For the AI/ML community this means faster prototyping and reproducible edge deployments, easier access to hardware acceleration and pre‑tuned models, and a supported path from prototype to production for robotics, vision, and audio/NLP applications on a compact, energy‑efficient platform.