News Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit is an $899 mini PC — meant to develop for Windows on Arm

[Admin]

The Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows comes with a Snapdragon X Elite SoC, 32GB of RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD.

Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit is an $899 mini PC — meant to develop for Windows on Arm : Read more

 

[Notton]

I'm not familiar with SDK costs, but as someone who has looked at many mini-PCs, it's about $150~170 too expensive.
8845HS/8945HS mini-PC with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD is around $750~800.

Hopefully someone else sells one for cheaper? (I can live without SDK tools)

 

[ThomasKinsley]

I'm not familiar with SDK costs, but as someone who has looked at many mini-PCs, it's about $150~170 too expensive.
8845HS/8945HS mini-PC with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD is around $750~800.

Hopefully someone else sells one for cheaper? (I can live without SDK tools)

Quite a few of those mini PCs are made in China and tend to come with a modified BIOS and questionable practices. Qualcomm's main competitor is the Mac Mini, which apparently can't have 32GB of RAM. A 16GB variant with 512GB of storage is priced at $999, so Qualcomm is still cheaper. I certainly hope that we get more competition so ARM on Windows does not require Apple prices to enjoy it.

 

[JamesJones44]

I'm not familiar with SDK costs, but as someone who has looked at many mini-PCs, it's about $150~170 too expensive.
8845HS/8945HS mini-PC with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD is around $750~800.

Hopefully someone else sells one for cheaper? (I can live without SDK tools)

In most cases for software languages the SDKs are free. You can use .NET an cross build C++/C#/F# into ARM and x64 for free. Same with Go, Java, Electron (trying not to puke writing that), Flutter, etc. IDK if Qualcomm is selling something special SDK wise, but most developers shouldn't need it.

 

[Mecwee]

I am hoping someone can compare these ai pcs from qualcomm, amd and Intel. Architecture, developer friendly, performance, etc.?

 

[kealii123]

Its easy to compare this to other consumer mini PCs, but thats not the target audience. Its for developers.

Personally, I'd buy one if it came with 64 gig of RAM so it could run the largest param LLama3 (that 45tflops is pretty good) but the intention is for developers to optimize their software on a platform that mimics what their users will have, which is going to be Qualcomm laptops with 16-32 gigs of RAM, and on the same chip.

This is not intended for consumers.

 

[bit_user]

At the $599 price point of Microsoft's Project Volterra, this would be super tempting if it natively booted Linux. However, at $899 starts to push it above my "toy" price range and I'm not quite ready to switch to ARM as my daily driver (absent other considerations, like laptop battery life).

Despite these efforts, Arm-powered Windows PCs still hasn’t reached mainstream success,

Competition, bro. Let's get more players in this market, because even though no one can probably compete with Qualcomm on performance, you can bet they'll considerably undercut them on price. For someone like me, I'd rather have a good laptop that's cheap than take out a second mortgage for the best laptop, only to have it superseded within a year.

 

[kealii123]

At the $599 price point of Microsoft's Project Volterra, this would be super tempting if it natively booted Linux. However, at $899 starts to push it above my "toy" price range and I'm not quite ready to switch to ARM as my daily driver (absent other considerations, like laptop battery life).


Competition, bro. Let's get more players in this market, because even though no one can probably compete with Qualcomm on performance, you can bet they'll considerably undercut them on price. For someone like me, I'd rather have a good laptop that's cheap than take out a second mortgage for the best laptop, only to have it superseded within a year.

Do you write software for Windows users? If you don't, this product isn't intended for you.

The vast majority of sales will be on a company, not personal, credit card.

 

[bit_user]

Do you write software for Windows users? If you don't, this product isn't intended for you.

I am speaking about its value proposition, as a mini-PC. As for the "Windows" part, didn't you hear that Qualcomm is leaning into Linux support?

https://www.tomshardware.com/softwa...official-linux-support-for-snapdragon-x-elite
​

So, if this dev kit is coming from Qualcomm and not Microsoft, then it's quite likely they'll be supporting Linux on it!

The vast majority of sales will be on a company, not personal, credit card.

As long as they don't prohibit private sales, it can be regarded as being on the open market.

 

[Findecanor]

I like this form factor. In the past I have used either an EeeBox or a Mac Mini as my main computer (running Linux).

Apart from horsepower and upgrades, I have learned that they really should have USB A and a headphone jack on the front.
Having those readily accessible at desktop height provides the best usability. You don't want to rummage around the back.
The EeeBox was also vertical on a grippy and weighty foot that kept it in place.

Qualcomm: Please iterate and release a cheaper consumer version that have that!

 

[bit_user]

The EeeBox was also vertical on a grippy and weighty foot that kept it in place.

You might be able to replicate this by using a rubber mat.

Qualcomm: Please iterate and release a cheaper consumer version that have that!

They won't. Qualcomm makes reference devices and development kits, but leaves it up to their partners to cater to specific consumer needs.

 

[abufrejoval]

So, if this dev kit is coming from Qualcomm and not Microsoft, then it's quite likely they'll be supporting Linux on it!

I wish I had your confidence.

As long as they don't prohibit private sales, it can be regarded as being on the open market.

It's locked via fTPM and/or Pluton so the open market may be in the e-waste category.

Let's just see, also if anyone wants to sell it at scale and more economical prices.

A little price war between Apple and these might be interesting to observe.

 

[abufrejoval]

Personally, I'd buy one if it came with 64 gig of RAM so it could run the largest param LLama3 (that 45tflops is pretty good) but the intention is for developers to optimize their software on a platform that mimics what their users will have, which is going to be Qualcomm laptops with 16-32 gigs of RAM, and on the same chip.

Don't hold your breath for LLM performance, because that's more RAM bandwidth limited than size limited as every token requires another pass through the weights. There is a reason HBM is so popular there.

Those tflops were functionally fixed at chip design time and with all their flexibility may never see much actual use, because paradigms shift faster than quicksand turned into silicon. To me all these NPUs are dark silicon until disproven otherwise.

Their current forte would be dense vision and sound models, perhaps several of them or slightly larger ones, but just the management around that model zoo may be far from having any useful abstractions, made worse by some of them having real-time demands. So chances of them running PC user controlled workloads are rather slim.

They sort of work on phones with fixed functional allocations to augmented cameras and audio, but on a PC their principal use is keeping constant track of the users and I don't know why I should pay for that, except to have it removed.

Of course I wouldn't mind 64 or even 128GB of RAM at commodity prices. But that trend of bleeding you for RAM may just be another carryover from the fruity cult and since it's fixed at production, the temptation to exploit your lack of choice is just too big to resist.

 

[cknobman]

At the $599 price point of Microsoft's Project Volterra, this would be super tempting if it natively booted Linux. However, at $899 starts to push it above my "toy" price range and I'm not quite ready to switch to ARM as my daily driver (absent other considerations, like laptop battery life).


Competition, bro. Let's get more players in this market, because even though no one can probably compete with Qualcomm on performance, you can bet they'll considerably undercut them on price. For someone like me, I'd rather have a good laptop that's cheap than take out a second mortgage for the best laptop, only to have it superseded within a year.

I'm thinking the same as you.

Had this been $599 I'd be ordering yesterday.
Great toy to play with for code development or tinkering with Linux.

$900 is just way too high.

 

[kealii123]

Don't hold your breath for LLM performance, because that's more RAM bandwidth limited than size limited as every token requires another pass through the weights. There is a reason HBM is so popular there.

Those tflops were functionally fixed at chip design time and with all their flexibility may never see much actual use, because paradigms shift faster than quicksand turned into silicon. To me all these NPUs are dark silicon until disproven otherwise.

Their current forte would be dense vision and sound models, perhaps several of them or slightly larger ones, but just the management around that model zoo may be far from having any useful abstractions, made worse by some of them having real-time demands. So chances of them running PC user controlled workloads are rather slim.

They sort of work on phones with fixed functional allocations to augmented cameras and audio, but on a PC their principal use is keeping constant track of the users and I don't know why I should pay for that, except to have it removed.

Of course I wouldn't mind 64 or even 128GB of RAM at commodity prices. But that trend of bleeding you for RAM may just be another carryover from the fruity cult and since it's fixed at production, the temptation to exploit your lack of choice is just too big to resist.

Dang, thats tough.

So right now ,the best/cheapest/most-efficient way to have a local LLM on my LAN is to buy an M1 studio 64gig used on ebay.

 

[bit_user]

$900 is just way too high.

I'm not even saying it's not worth $900. I'm just saying $600 is close enough to my impulse buy threshold, whereas $900 is well outside that territory, for me. If I actually needed something exactly like it, I think the price wouldn't be an issue.