Friday, November 22, 2024

Here’s the eight-inch Snapdragon PC for your Windows on Arm experiments

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The new $899.99 “Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows” houses the most powerful of Qualcomm’s lineup of Snapdragon X Elite chips — the one with the 4.6 TFLOP GPU — as well as 32GB of LPDDR5x RAM, 512GB of NVMe storage, and lots of ports, all within roughly the same volume as Apple’s mini desktop.

While the spec sheet unfortunately suggests the two-pound PC will only ship in black — not the transparent model at the top of this post — the eight- by seven- by 1.3-inch PC does have Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and enough oomph to run three 4K monitors at once.

Ports include three USB4 ports with Type-C connectors, a pair of USB 3.2 ports with Type-A, ethernet, 3.5mm audio, and HDMI. So if you want to go the multi-monitor route, expect to plug in at least one USB-C cable or adapter.

Speaking of adapters, what you won’t find in Qualcomm’s images here is the power brick: it’s got an external 180W AC adapter.

While the Dev Kit might be more cost-effective than the new wave of Microsoft Copilot Plus PC laptops that include similar Qualcomm chips, it’s not by much: the Surface Laptop 6 starts at $999.99 and obviously comes with its own screen. And it’s not clear just anyone will be able to buy the Dev Kit: Qualcomm’s landing page currently points to a contact form that you may need to fill out to get one.

Update, May 21st: One other potential advantage for the Dev Kit over the first wave of laptops: Microsoft says the Dev Kit has a peak TDP of over 80 watts.

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