Something odd happened to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Dev Kit, an $899 mini PC powered by Windows 11 and the company’s latest Snapdragon X Elite processor. Qualcomm decided to abruptly discontinue the product, refund all orders (including for those with units on hand), and cease its support, claiming the device “has not met our usual standards of excellence.”
↫ Taras Buria at Neowin
The launch of the Snapdragon X Pro and Elite chips seems to have mostly progressed well, but there have been a few hiccups for those of us who want ARM but aren’t interested in Windows and/or laptops. There’s this story, which is just odd all around, with an announced, sold, and even shipped product suddenly taken off the market, which I think at this point was the only non-laptop device with an X Elite or Pro chip. If you are interested in developing for Qualcomm’s new platform, but don’t want a laptop, you’re out of luck for now. Another note is that the SoC SKU in the Dev Kit was clocked a tiny bit higher than the laptop SKUs, which perhaps plays a role in its cancellation.
The bigger hiccup is the problematic Linux bring-up, which is posing many more problems and is taking a lot longer than Qualcomm very publicly promised it would take. For now, if you want to run Linux on a Snapdragon X Elite or Pro device, you’re going to need a custom version of your distribution of choice, tailored to a specific laptop model, using a custom kernel. It’s an absolute mess and basically means that at this point in time, months and months after release, buying one of these to run Linux on them is a bad idea. Quite a few important bits will arrive with Linux 6.12 to supposedly greatly improve the experience, but seeing is believing.
Qualcomm made a lot of grandiose promises about Linux support, and they simply haven’t delivered.
“The launch of the Snapdragon X Pro and Elite chips seems to have mostly progressed well, ”
Was it really?
According to digitimes it was a dud:
https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20240916PD211/qualcomm-market-ai-pc-mediatek-2024.html?
And just yesterday the news dropped, that the intergrated NPU is massively underperforming:
“TL;DR – We see 1.3% of Qualcomm’s NPU 45 Teraops/s claim when benchmarking Windows AI PCs”
https://github.com/usefulsensors/qc_npu_benchmark
There was a lot of early positive press about how energy efficient they are. But then there was a lot of negative press about how incompatible they are, especially with games. We’ve also seen some hard limits at hte upper end of performance (we’ve seen the same with Apple’s MX chips, though it doesn’t get as much press on the Apple side as these Samsung chips have received – I believe that comes down to brand marketing, and maybe the lack of a solid x86 emulation story, which Apple does have.)
The reason ARM is going to dominate has everything to do with their business model. They charge rent, to license their tech, and allow companies to extend their tech with their own customizations, and work out production themselves. For companies like Apple and Samsung, that’s always going to be more appealing than the alternative. The x86 vendors make commodity hardware, and sell finished units for profit margin (like good capitalists). That model works well for workstations, and might work for laptops with an effort at efficiency (we are seeing some of the results of that now with recent Intel and AMD chips – so much for that ISA theory…). But that model doesn’t work as well for companies that want to offer more of a differentiator.
To AMD’s credit, they’ve been offering custom design services for a while, so we have them in games consoles, and Steam Deck, an some other semi-custom places. This is the middleground between Intel’s aggressive commodity play, and ARM’s do-it-yourself approach. Interestingly, Intel is now pivoting in that direction, and away from the balls out commodity model they had been using for the last few decades. The evidence for this, is that they are selling off their fab business, just like AMD did a decade and a half ago. That’s only partly driven by their failures in the fab business, which has a decade long runway to recover from. It’s also driven by changes in the chip consumption landscape (their consumers – other hardware makers, not end-consumers). I suspect we’ll see a lot more semi-custom chipsets from Intel going forward.
As a side note, I wonder whether the new arrangement between Intel and AMD to work on x86 together (whatever that means) will lead to some of the minor fixups to the ISA that would make sense – like ditching some of the very old backward compatibility stuff that makes their decode pipeline just a little more complicated than it needs to be.
“Bigger hiccup” according to whom? How many people who want a computer with a Snapdragon X Elite want to run Desktop Linux on it? I mean, as a percentage of the total market for these things.
And this is why Desktop Linux people cheering for ARM (or even RISC-V) is dumb: PCs are a known quantity (and they even have iGPUs with open-source drivers), but the moment you leave the leafy suburbs of PC-land and step onto ARM or RISC-V territory, all bets are off, you are entering a world of non-standard bootloaders and proprietary drivers that require hacked Linux kernels to function.
kurkosdr,
I grant you that all the problems with ARM bootloading and general lack of standards creates a lot of trouble…but that doesn’t mean linux users don’t want good ARM computers. Having used a few raspberry PIs, I’d say software compatibility is already quite good on ARM. If an ARM vendor officially supported linux on hardware in the same class as apple M# ARM cpus, it would be a winner. Many of us want qualcomm to do this successfully however execution really matters and too often linux gets treated as a second class platform. 🙁
Nope, it’s garbage, with the lack of hardware acceleration for OpenGL being the big issue. This can be traced to the fact the RPis (like many other ARM boards) are powered by a smartphone SoC, where OpenGL support isn’t universal. Even the Raspberry Pi 5 doesn’t do OpenGL, it only does OpenGL ES and Vulkan. Too bad most Desktop Linux software that requires OpenGL graphics acceleration requires OpenGL proper, not OpenGL ES.
Really, I wanted to love my RPI3B+, but ended up with a passively-cooled Mini PC with an i7-5500U. At least an i7-5500U (and the UEFI bootloader it comes with) is a known quantity.
Windows dev here. To be honest I wantrd to order one of these kits for development and testing of our .NET application to asure it runs well on that platform too. But then they were sold out and Qualcomm came up with their free device cloud, where you get to spent a few hours testing on a Windows 11 system in the cloud.
It was just perfect. We could test every possible case we needed to and didn‘t have order such a dev kit, that would now be collecting dust anyway.
BTW, testing revealed that you still can‘t install Microsoft SQL Server 2022 (latest release) on Windows 11 on ARM. So yes, go buy that new Surface Pro device as a .NET dev. It will run like forever compared to your sh*ty HP or Dell laptop, but it won‘t run SQL Server.
Luckily you’ll find out that SQL Server LocalDB works, and you think, well, that will do for now, then you move on, install Visual Studio 2022 which by now runs native on ARM, but then… it doesn‘t come with the Office development module. So your sources won‘t compile.
Come on.
This is Microsoft.
Selling a Desktop OS.
On a Microsoft branded system.
They don‘t even run all their software? Even emulated would be fine, but no. It just doesn’t work.
And they wonder why everyone does web dev by now and recommends Smartphones and Tablets?
Too bad.
So again Windows on ARM ending up being a total train wreck, now who possibly could have predicted that. We all know on what operating system, outside Apple, is to ARM on what Windows is to x86 and beyond. So Qualcomm best to focus on GNU/Linux or it won’t happen in regards to the “PC desktop”. I don’t know what they were thinking with Windows, likely some upper management was involved not in touch with reality. The amount of money they must have burned for it, just beyond.