Qualcomm discontinues Snapdragon Dev Kit mini PC, promises to refund orders - Liliputing

The Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows is a mini PC with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-001DE) processor that went up for pre-order this summer for $899. Now, just a few months later, Qualcomm has pulled the plug on the little computer.

According to Jeff Geerling and xda-developers, customers who ordered one from Arrow Electronics are now receiving emails letting them know that Qualcomm has “made the decision to pause this product and the support of it, indefinitely.” The chip maker says it’ll refund customers who have already purchased the Snapdragon Dev Kit.

When the company first introduced the mini PC earlier this year, it was positioned as a tool for developers that wanted to get started working with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X series processors.

The 8″ x 7″ x 1.3″ computer is powered by one of Qualcomm’s most powerful chips to date, with 12 CPU cores, a GPU that delivers up to 4.6 TFLOPS of graphics performance, and a 45 TOPS neural processing unit for hardware-accelerated AI.

Other features include 32GB of LPDDR5x memory, a 512GB NVMe SSD, four USB4 prots, two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, a headphone jack, Gigabit Ethernet, and support for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

Overall it sounds pretty impressive on paper, and since the mini PC is a little chunkier than a typical laptop, Qualcomm allows the processor to run at up to 80 watts for better sustained performance.

But in reality, it took Qualcomm longer than anticipated to start shipping the dev kit. By the time the first units were ready to ship, you could already buy laptops with similar chips for under $1000, and even lower-priced models are starting to arrive. It seems likely that developers who really want to get their feet wet working with Qualcomm’s latest PC chips would probably be better off just buying one of those instead.

Still, it’d be nice to be able to get a mini PC with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X processors. Up until now the only option had been the Snapdragon Dev Kit, and now that it’s been discontinued, there aren’t any desktops featuring these chips.

via Hacker News

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