In order to encourage developers to port their apps to Windows 10 on Arm, Qualcomm and Microsoft have announced the Snapdragon Developer Kit based on a Snapdragon Compute platform and aiming to provide a cost-efficient platform that will be less costly than a laptop.
The development kit looks like a mini PC, and while the full specs have not been announced, it could well be powered by the just-announced Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 processor, itself a cheaper version of Snapdragon 7c.
Qualcomm did not share photos of all the ports from the developer kit, but the photos we’ve got come with “QC710” file name, and reveal a power button on the top, an LED on one corner, two USB ports, a MicroSD card slot, and a SIM card socket.
I’d assume at least one HDMI or DisplayPort at the back, and possibly an Ethernet port, but we just don’t know as developers’ resources specific to this developer kit are limited to say the least.
What the companies announced is that Visual C++ compilers and libraries for ARM64 can befound in Visual Studio 15.9 and greater, and native ARM64 versions of many open-source development tools for recompiling, optimizing and testing applications are already available. This includes LLVM, the Chromium framework, the .NET 5.0 framework, MinGW and GCC, Cygwin, Electron, Qt, GTK, OpenVPN, the FFMPEG library, Boost, GStreamer, and others.
We should have many more details to share this summer once the Snapdragon “QC710” developer kit becomes commercially available on Microsoft Store. Some quotes and a few more details may be found in the press release.
[Update: QC710 is now listed on ECS with more details (thanks Cristoffer!) including the specifications:
- Platform – SC 7180 (QSIP 7180) with 4GB LPDDR4 PoP
- Storage – 64GB eMMC flash, MicroSD card slot
- Video Output – HDMI
- Connectivity
- 10/100M Ethernet
- 4G LTE with SIM card slot or eSIM
- Optional 802.11ax (PCIe module)
- USB – 1 x USB 2.0 Type-C (PD-Charging), 1 x USB 2.0 Type-A, 1 x USB 3.2 Gen1
- Dimensions – 119 x 116.6 x 35 mm
- Weight – 230 grams
]
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
