Qualcomm Snapdragon Mini PC Dev Kit with Snapdragon X Elite Now Available for Pre-Order

Is the era of x86 computing coming to an end? Not at all, although today’s Arm-based solutions pose the biggest threat yet to x86’s decades-long dominance in the Windows environment, and over time we may see a shift toward a more balanced (or at least less asymmetric) lineup of chips. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Plus platforms are leading this shift, and it’s gaining traction with the Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows.

The Snapdragon Dev Kit is essentially a sleek and fairly inexpensive mini PC powered by the top-of-the-line Snapdragon X Elite SKU, the X1E-00-1DE. Here’s a quick rundown…

Snapdragon X Elite and Plus specifications table.

All four Snapdragon X Elite SKUs (the other three are X1E-84-100, X1E-80-100, and X1E-78-100) feature a dozen CPU cores, 42MB of total cache, support for LPDDR5x-8448 memory, and a dedicated 45 TOPS NPU (neural processing unit) for AI tasks. However, the X1E-00-1DE is the fastest of them all with a multi-threaded frequency of 3.8GHz, which is the same as the X1E-84-100, and a dual core boost clock of 4.3GHz, which is 100MHz higher.

This is also the first appearance of the Snapdragon X Elite outside of the Copilot+ laptop. However, it’s not aimed at mainstream consumers, and is instead aimed at developers to test Windows apps and code, especially those who want to make sure their x86 software will run smoothly on Arm-based hardware.

Rear view of the Snapdragon Dev Kit showing the ports.

The Snapdragon X Elite on board this model also has an Adreno GPU with graphics performance of up to 4.6 TFLOPS. Other basic specifications of the mini PC as a whole include 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD.

Connectivity includes three USB4 ports, two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, a LAN port, a 3.5mm audio jack, and an HDMI output. And when it comes to wireless connectivity, it supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.