Qualcomm Bringing Snapdragon X Series To Mini PCs For As Little As ~$600 USD

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Qualcomm Bringing Snapdragon X Series To Mini PCs For As Little As ~$600 USD

Following last year's launch of Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 powered laptops, Qualcomm is using CES 2025 this week in Las Vegas for promoting the Snapdragon X Series for mini desktop form factor PCs. But the Linux support and performance out of these forthcoming Snapdragon X Platform mini PCs remain to be seen...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X1-Mini-PCs

[Danny3]

Without first class support for Linux, it's garbage!
Fuck them!
Can barely wait for CES to start to write a few comments about this on other social platforms too.

[ayumu]

Not RISC-V, so why even bother.

[sophisticles]

Without first class support for Linux, it's garbage!
Fuck them!

Qualcomm is a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation:

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members

Platinum membership costs 500k a year and Qualcomm is a regular contributor to the Linux kernel.

This leaves us with one of two possibilities as to why full Linux support is not available for these devices:

1) There may be something inherently incompatible between the way Linux is structured that makes it very difficult to support this hardware.

2) There is no significant demand in the market for Linux support on these devices.

I tend to favor the second possibility, the free market usually decides what gets adopted and what doesn't.

[carguello2]

2) There is no significant demand in the market for Linux support on these devices.

This is it.

[Phil995511]

It's 30% more expensive than the AMD mini PC I've just bought. And when it comes to operating systems and software, the ARM offer is really very light in comparison.

Offering machines based on ARM CPUs is a nice idea, but not at such prices !!

If they want to sell their machines, they need to be at least 30 % cheaper than the cheapest x86 PC in the same category. Because nobody, or almost nobody, will want to pay such a price for a machine with which, in comparison, you can't do much...

[NateHubbard]

It's 30% more expensive than the AMD mini PC I've just bought.

Yeah, I have a low end 8 core AMD chip with 64gb of ram and a couple of SSDs installed. I imagine one of these Qualcomm devices is going to be an expensive downgrade. If they were standardized better, it would help a lot. A mini-itx board with ram slots and pci-e ports would be a good start.

[loganj]

Michael you should put quota to As Little As

[schmidtbag]

This is it.

This is a chicken and egg situation.
ARM SBCs have proven for years to have a stronger Linux community than Windows. The demand would go up if there was proper support. Raspberry Pi is wildly successful despite being mediocre even by ARM standards, and it's not the best value option either. The only reason RPis are so successful is because it's very well supported. I wouldn't be surprised if Qualcomm could have seen better success trying to be a high-end competitor to RPi, rather than failing multiple times trying to get a desirable Windows ARM experience.

[openminded]

It's 30% more expensive than the AMD mini PC I've just bought. And when it comes to operating systems and software, the ARM offer is really very light in comparison.

Offering machines based on ARM CPUs is a nice idea, but not at such prices !!

If they want to sell their machines, they need to be at least 30 % cheaper than the cheapest x86 PC in the same category. Because nobody, or almost nobody, will want to pay such a price for a machine with which, in comparison, you can't do much...

What's their rationale for such a high price tag then I wonder? Or they're just relying on promotion and advertising? Well Apple fans won't quit loving Apple whatever any other company would do. Windows users are conservative in general, so no major numbers of switchers from that side too, esp given current pros and cons of such decision. This could be a good fit for enthusiastic crowd of geeks but the lack of Linux support and questionable price tag can hardly convince many people to move onto a new architecture. And what's left (that could have worked) is only brainwashing commercials and so on but will that bring them a lot of new loyal customers? I doubt it will.