Another year, another fantastic concept product from Qualcomm that will never actually appear on shop shelves. The wheel turns, nothing is ever different…
Seriously, though, this might be the most upset I’ve ever been about getting hands-on time with a device that won’t ever see the light of day in the consumer market. At the Snapdragon Summit 2025 in sunny Hawaii (special thanks to Qualcomm for flying me out there!), we saw the arrival of powerful new Snapdragon X2 Elite processors – and just like last year, Qualcomm had prepared some very polished reference devices to showcase its new chips.
Now, many companies either won’t bother with designing fancy-looking reference units, instead showcasing actual market-ready devices from their manufacturing partners (or simply relying on showing statistics on a slideshow). Not Qualcomm, though: this year, the Snapdragon team’s engineers clearly put a lot of work into producing some extremely nice-looking devices in shiny Snapdragon red, and you can see the whole lineup below.
Small but mighty
One device in particular caught my eye: the impossibly compact Snapdragon X2 Elite mini PC concept. It was about as thick as my smartphone (the Google Pixel 8) and measured less than six inches in diameter, equipped with USB-C ports as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack and micro SIM slot for wireless internet capabilities. Thermal management is handled by the remarkable Frore AirJet compact cooling solution, which I originally reported on two years back.
Based on the seriously impressive performance projections of the new Snapdragon X2 platform, this thing would almost certainly find its way onto our ranking of the best mini PCs – if it were actually a real product, that is. By volume, it’s even smaller than the newly downsized M4 Mac mini, which won a rare five stars in our review earlier this year (though Apple‘s tiny computer does still have a smaller footprint).
As a self-confessed mini PC lover, I was enthralled by this tiny red circle – not least because of how powerful this thing is. The Snapdragon X2 Elite chip offers a serious step up in performance against the previous-gen X Elite, and this time around, there’s also the even more powerful X2 Elite Extreme.
The new Extreme chip offers more than 40% faster performance in Adobe Lightroom and Premiere Pro compared to the original Snapdragon X Elite, along with 28% faster photo editing in Photoshop (as demonstrated by a live PugetBench test I was shown at the event). I also saw a laptop with the same chip average 90 frames per second in the 3DMark Solar Bay benchmark – an impressive score for a device without a discrete GPU.
Make it happen, Qualcomm
Now, these reference devices are merely expected to demonstrate what Qualcomm’s OEM partners could do with the new X2-series processors. But after seeing some of these devices in action, I was left thinking one thing: guys, perhaps you should just make and sell some of these things yourselves?
Honestly, it’s not often I see test hardware like this and actually think yep, I’d buy that. This little red disc had me genuinely enchanted from the moment I picked it up. Such performance in such a tiny form factor is practically unheard of in the computing space, with most mini PCs being three or four times as thick as Qualcomm’s reference device.
And don’t even get me started on the Snapdragon all-in-one system on the same display. I like a good all-in-one, and it’s once again an area where Apple dominates, thanks to its excellent M4 iMac 24-inch. But this device took it one step further; the display and base are actually just a dock for a similar (but square) tiny PC, which might have been even smaller than its circular sibling. Let me tell you, reader, when I saw that thing detach, I was shook.
So please, Qualcomm – perhaps it’s time to take matters into your own hands, and properly enter the consumer hardware game. You’ve clearly got the creative staff needed to make great designs, and the new X2 chips speak for themselves.
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christian.guyton@futurenet.com (Christian Guyton)
