
Qualcomm just announced the Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows mini-PC to encourage developers to build more Arm-native apps for Windows 11. This comes shortly after several laptop makers launched Windows 11 laptops powered by Snapdragon X chips. Although these new chips offer better performance and battery life than top Intel and AMD laptop processors, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chip use the Arm architecture, which requires emulation to run x86 apps that many Windows PCs use.
According to Qualcomm’s product brief, a Snapdragon X Elite SoC powers this mini-PC, which boasts a 12-core 3.8-GHz Oryon CPU, an Adreno GPU, and a Hexagon NPU that can run up to 4.5 TOPS. It also has 32GB LPDDR5x RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD. This small computer measures 8 x 7 x 1.3 inches, which puts it close enough to the size of a Mac mini. It also has a 3.5mm audio jack, three USB 4 Type-C, two USB 3.2 Type-A, an RJ45 ethernet, and an HDMI port — similar to what Apple offers in the M2 Mac mini.