The most affordable Copilot Plus PC system has gone on sale, and it’s not even a laptop. We are talking about the official development kit from Qualcomm based on the flagship Arm processor Snapdragon X Elite. The device can be classified, rather, into the categories of mini-PCs or nettops. It became available for pre-order, and its official sales will begin on August 23.
Image Source: Qualcomm
The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit for Windows costs only $899. Most Copilot Plus PC laptops available for sale now cost over $1,000. The Snapdragon X Elite Dev Kit is powered by a 12-core Snapdragon X Elite X-1E-00-1DE processor with a maximum frequency of 3.8 GHz across all cores. On two cores, the chip can automatically overclock to 4.3 GHz.
The processor contains 42 MB of cache memory, a built-in iGPU Adreno with a performance of 4.6 teraflops, as well as an AI engine (NPU) with a performance of 45 TOPS (trillion operations per second). The system also offers 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM and a “fast” 512 GB NVMe solid-state drive.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon Dev Kit runs on the Windows 11 operating system. The system dimensions are 199 × 175 × 35 mm. The mini PC has three external USB4 Type-C ports (one on the front), two USB 3.2 Type-A, one LAN, one HDMI and one 3.5mm audio output. Support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 is also announced.
Why do you need such a mini-PC based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor? The manufacturer sees software developers as key customers who can use it to develop and test native Windows applications on Arm. However, it can also be purchased by ordinary consumers if they are primarily interested in the AI capabilities of Copilot Plus PC systems. But this mini PC should not be considered as a gaming PC. Although Copilot Plus PCs can run games, the Snapdragon X Elite platform is clearly not ready to compete with x86-compatible systems in the gaming space. As the first reviews of laptops based on Snapdragon X Elite show, the performance of the integrated Adreno graphics leaves much to be desired. Other iGPUs and even basic Intel processor builds provide significantly higher performance.