After yesterday's announcement of a slew of new Qualcomm—powered windows AI laptops, all the major notebook manufacturers got on board, and the company today lines up with them the new Snapdragon Dev Kit is exactly what it says: Native code for windows applications for the new Arm—based Snapdragon Cpu.

But it's sleek and comes with the most powerful Snapdragon X Elite chip we've seen - with a higher boost clock speed than advertised for laptops - with all the ports and I absolutely love the transparent look with a black PCB. We are delving into it. 

The chip at its heart is still the 12-core X Elite, but it has the designation X1E-00-1DE, and the X1E-4.3-84-100, which offers dual-core boosts of up to 42 GHz (even if it's not a rush), a total cache of 42MB, an Adreno GPU of 4.6 TFLOPs, and perhaps most importantly It uses the same Orion core with 45TOPs Hexagon NPU. 

Importantly, this is because it is a development kit specifically designed to help developers not only port application code to the Arm ecosystem, but also work natively with Snapdragon silicon on Windows, as well as shift a bunch of processing that can be done on the NPU rather than the CPU.

The Snapdragon X Elite, after all, is currently the only hardware that can match what Microsoft wants when it comes to Copilot+AI PCs. They need to be able to deliver more than 40 Ai processing power, and no, it doesn't count Gpus in that. Because, for a reason, I only want these Copilot+ features to be able to run natively in the npu. The remaining development kit specifications provide 32GB of Lpddr5X memory and 512GB of NVMe storage.

On top of that, there are plenty of USB4Type-C sockets, type A pairs, Ethernet, audio combo jacks, and HDMI ports. You can also get Qualcomm's Wi-Fi7-enabled network silicon.

Obviously, the Snapdragon Dev Kit is not really designed for home users and we still don't know how it will actually work in a Windows environment under emulation.I'm not sure if the X Elite Cpu will "work" in PC games, but there's a certain perverse part of me that really wants to know what happens when you strap the eGPU.

The Snapdragon Dev Kit is now available from the Snapdragon developer portal on Windows, priced at9900.