Qualcomm has officially announced the end of sales and support of the X-Elite development kit for Windows, less than five months after its announcement. In a letter to customers, Qualcomm confirmed that the product has been “suspended” and that customers who paid $899 for the system will be refunded.
Image source: Qualcomm
A Qualcomm spokesperson confirmed to The Register that the approximately 200 customers who received the X-Elite Dev Kit can turn in their mini PCs, but may not do so. Let us remind you that the Dev Kit was announced along with the long-awaited Qualcomm X-Elite and X-Plus mobile processors and was planned to be used as a platform for developing applications for Windows on the Arm architecture. The device is roughly the size of an Intel NUC and features a 12-core Snapdragon X-Elite processor, Adreno GPU, 32GB of LPDDR5x memory, and a 45 TOPS Neural Processing Unit (NPU).
Note that releasing development kits is a common practice when introducing new architectures and provides a relatively inexpensive tool for porting applications to a new platform. However, unlike Apple, which made the M1-based Dev Kit available before its official launch, Qualcomm did not do so. As a result, kit deliveries were delayed for months.
Qualcomm said in a statement: “The launch of more than 30 PCs powered by the Snapdragon X series processors confirms our success in creating cutting-edge technologies. However, the development kit does not meet our high standards, and therefore we have decided to suspend this product and its support indefinitely.”
Currently, instead of a physical development kit for testing applications, Qualcomm recommends developers to use its cloud solutions.