It’s already been a few weeks since the launch of Windows on Arm, with the Microsft Copilot+ PCs, as the laptops brought about a new competitor to the market. They don’t feature Intel or AMD CPUs and moving on from the X86 architecture that’s been the standard for many years now finally, if anyone has been thinking of developing for the new platform, as it is quite the difference. Although Microsoft has tried to make things easier with emulation it has not been successful across the board.
So although the dev kit had been announced for some time, there’s not been much public listing of it. Now as Videocardz reported, the Dev Kit has appeared at the retailer Arrow. Starting at $899 and estimated to be available on the 23rd of August, it brings the top Snapdragon processor in a kit and a small form factor mini-PC that should offer a compact way of bringing these kits out, and still offering quite a bit of hardware inside. But the price may not be the most appealing aspect as it’s quite a high cost that might not be the most a platform seeing wide adoption as Microsoft is still trying to improve the gaming performance of Copilot+ PCs.
Snapdragon Dev kit mini-PC specs
When it comes to what you actually get for your money, the dev kit comes with a Snapdragon X Elite processor, the fastest there is out there in terms of Qualcomm processing. It brings with it 12 cores clocked up to 3.8GHz with a total cache of 42MB and a dual-core boost up to 4.3GHz. The GPU on board is also a Qualcomm Adreno with up to 4.6 TFLOPS of performance along with the NPU being a Hexagon with up to 45 TOPS.
The size also comes in at 199x175x35mm (8x7x1.3″) which keeps it rather small and lightweight with a 970g weight. Whilst also bringing in 32GB Of LPDDR5x RAM and a 512GB NVMe SSD. All combined needing just a 180W power supply that is nothing too strenuous on your power bill.
As for the connections available, there you can find 3x USB 4 Typ-C, 2x USB 3.2 Type-A, 1x RJ45 ethernet, 1x 3.5mm audio jacks, and 1x HDMI ports. Although it doesn’t specify which generation the HDMI is, that will change its capabilities with the refresh rate and resolution but it’s unlikely to be anything too high as the GPU is unlikely to have a high power.
For wireless connectivity, it does utilize the fast WiFi 7 standard along with Bluetooth 5.4. So it does have a good combination of hardware to give a good performance to those developing on it. So there might actually be some worth considering the Snapdragon PCs if there are some more native applications for it.
