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

[mlau]

What's their rationale for such a high price tag then I wonder?

My guess is to suggest that it is a "premium" product. I completely agree with your other statements. The qualcomm devices are too expensive and the slow moving linux support makes them completely uninteresting compared to the almost-day1 support that x86 devices offer (I mean that they boot a kernel to a usable gui, i'm excluding custom hardware like cameras/sensors/...)
I do have a x1e device, its best feature is the oled screen. I hope amd will release a similar x86-based product.

[RejectModernity]

600 bucks??? Straight into the garbage bin. You can buy cheap Chinese Intel PCs for under 100 dollars. QC price tag is insane.

[habilain]

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.

There is a third and perhaps even more likely option, which is that Microsoft has supplied marketing/research funds for the Snapdragon X series of processors, and as part of this have made clear that Linux support is not a high priority. After all, Qualcomm only really needs Linux kernel support for it's phone processors, which are used with Android. Also note that, in general, Qualcomm seems fairly reluctant to support their Snapdragon X processors on Windows, let alone Linux, at least if the way that they handled the dev kit and especially GPU driver updates is any indication.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

600 bucks??? Straight into the garbage bin. You can buy cheap Chinese Intel PCs for under 100 dollars. QC price tag is insane.

Ridiculous comparison when that cheap Chinese Intel PC is running some garbage Celeron CPU. We are talking 8 perf cores here and a significantly faster GPU, along with a fast NPU (that's currently useless in Linux).

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Not RISC-V, so why even bother.

You post this a lot and it's nonsensical every time. Show us shipping products with RISC-V cores anywhere near as fast as Snapdragon X cores.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

It's the ~$600 laptop space where Qualcomm could see the most success. At ~$1000->$1500 USD it's a tough sell against Intel or AMD offerings. Down into budget laptop range, on a system with 8 perf cores and super long battery life, it's easier to overlook any software incompatibly issues.

[evasb]

Thought that ARM PCs would at least make a price competition against x86 but no, they want to sell "mini-PCs" that are always plugged on for a higher price than similar x86 hardware.

At least Apple has a lockdown in their platform, and their mini-PCs have the advantage of being developer boxes for iOS.

Ridiculous comparison when that cheap Chinese Intel PC is running some garbage Celeron CPU. We are talking 8 perf cores here and a significantly faster GPU, along with a fast NPU (that's currently useless in Linux).

You can find Ryzen 7 miniPCs (8C/16T) for less than $300 on Amazon US.

[_r00t-]

First full Linux support and then we'll discuss about it.

[kpedersen]

First full Linux support and then we'll discuss about it.

No. Make the devices dirt cheap and ubiquitous. Then the open-source community will do the work and write support for the hardware into Linux. This has been the case for almost every other vendors hardware. Why would this be different?

[ezst036]

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

This.