Hi all,
it has already been pointed out - while the Qualcomm CPUs are indeed very nice, powerful and power efficient but the built-in wireless basebands (mobile, WiFi, potentially BT too) are included on the CPU silicon die and share many parts of the main system with the basebands, especially RAM. While this is clever to save extra RAM chips for these basebands or chip size, it has the massive drawback that these basebands need to be able to access the main memory for their purpose. This means they have direct access to the main memory bus without control from the main CPU core. This again means that the baseband firmware could, at least in theory, access private data from the main memory without the user noticing. If you trust the baseband firmware, then this is not much of a problem. But especially the mobile modem’s baseband firmware is huge implementing complex protocols and runs an operating system on its own. You have no chance to control, debug or confine this firmware.
This is why we can not trust this firmware and must avoid a combined main CPU - baseband - RAM usage. So this rules out all Qalcomm SOC with integrated wireless radios which are basically all chips that would be usable for a phone.
The next issue is free GPU drivers. While there are some drivers for Qualcomm Snapdragon (freedreno) these are not as advanced as the Etnaviv for iMX.
The iMX6 is not ideal, yes. But we have high hopes to be able to use the iMX8, preferably the iMX8X which should be much more power efficient than iMX6.
I hope this clears it up a bit. If there are more questions or something unclear feel free to ask.
Cheers
nicole