At Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit, the company unveiled its Snapdragon X2 Elite processors for PCs. They serve as the follow-up to last year's X Elite series, which served as a kickstart for Windows on Arm and made an attempt to rival Apple's M-series. Qualcomm's reference designs on display at the summit included laptops, tablets, and some fascinating mini PCs, including a circular puck and a small square that docks into a monitor.
Pictured above is a reference design mini PC built around the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme, an 18-core powerhouse capable of boosting up to 5 GHz (across two cores) with support for 228 GB/s of memory bandwidth. It's a tier above even the X2 Elite, which begs the question: how is it so thin? We know that some of Qualcomm's concepts were cooled by Frore AirJets, so it's possible solid state cooling played a role.
The completely circular design is unlike anything we've seen before — it's like if someone took a trash-can Mac Pro and squashed it down to look like a coaster. It even appears like a modern Apple computer from the bottom, and has suitably similar I/O in the form of two USB-C ports, a headphone jack, and a barrel jack connection for power. The device also seems to be milled from aluminum, with a Snapdragon red finish.
Qualcomm also showed a square unit compressed down to be almost as thin as a USB-C port. This one's a bit different because it's intentionally squared to fit in as part of a modular all-in-one system. The mini PC slides into a base, connected to a large monitor, which it subsequently powers.
It feels like an upgrade to all-in-one computers that have existed for decades, but this one looks like you could swap out the computing parts.
Speaking of which, the company did tell PC Mag that it's working with at least three OEMs in Taiwan. That means it's possible there might be some interest in adapting these reference designs down the line.
As for the Frore AirJet cooling, it uses ultrasonic waves instead of fans to push/pull air. AirJet is the only way a system can be "actively" cooled without the need for conventional setups, so it makes perfect sense in this case. This isn't even the first time AirJet has been used to cool a commercial mini PC, though. Frore unveiled its AirJet Mini G2 earlier this year, so perhaps that's what's inside these Qualcomm reference designs.
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