Mini gaming PC maker Geekom is stepping up where Qualcomm has seemingly failed. The PC manufacturer will be the first to hit the mainstream market with a mini PC powered by Snapdragon X Elite Arm CPUs, rather than Intel or AMD x86 chips.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is the chip maker’s latest foray into the world of PCs. This Geekom entry is not expected to be one of the best gaming mini PC models in terms of performance. However, its appearance does demonstrate Windows on Arm making headway into the desktop space.
This news comes out of China’s social media platform, Weibo, but hasn’t appeared on Geekom’s website yet. Of course, Qualcomm was technically the first company to have a mini PC powered by Snapdragon X chips. This machine was a development kit, but ultimately failed to hit mass production and was scrapped. Only a few units actually reached those who had pre-ordered it, and those that did get shipped were riddled with issues, including the lack of an HDMI port.
Geekom hasn’t announced any pricing yet, but Snapdragon X Elite laptops from Microsoft’s CoPilot push currently cost around the $1,000 to $1,500 mark, but without the added baggage on the mini PC, we’d suspect a lighter price point below these figures for the Geekom mini PC.
Thanks to their reduced instruction set compared to x86, Arm CPUs have been popular in mobiles and tablets for a long time, but we’re now seeing the architecture make its way into even more machines. Apple has completely shifted to Arm with its M-Series chips, while Microsoft is making decent development progress with compatibility for Windows.
Valve has also recently been spotted working on Arm compatibility for Steam. In September, SteamDB, a database for most Steam activity under the hood, surfaced, showing that “proton-arm64” was being tested. This included Left 4 Dead 2 and Garry’s Mod being used with Valve’s software translation layer, which has been paramount to the Steam Deck’s Linux success.
If Qualcomm is partnering with Geekom on this mini PC, seeing more access to the Snapdragon Elite X could push Arm development on the gaming front forward. We were impressed by the build quality on offer for the money in our recent Geekom AX8 Pro review, and we’re interested to see how this Arm mini PC shapes up. If managed properly by Qualcomm, we could see our best gaming CPU list infiltrated by an Arm chip in the near future.