qualcomm

I signed up to buy a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Dev Kit the second I found out about it. It's supposed to be the Mac mini killer for Windows.

They even promoted it with this amazing-looking transparent shell, and I and hundreds of other devs were ready to pony up the $899 Qualcomm was asking.

Their pre-order form said it would be out June 18. Almost exactly one month later, I got an email saying it was available. Great!

So I went to the purchase page on Arrow... and it showed as out of stock. That was about 15 minutes after receiving the email.

There were three possibilities:

In spite of Microsoft's cryptic announcement of Project Volterra, and Qualcomm's continuous lineup of 'flagship' ARM SoCs for Windows, Microsoft is still behind the 8-ball when it comes to ARM.

Apparently, in 2016, Microsoft entered into an exclusivity deal with Qualcomm. That's why all official 'Windows on ARM' devices use Qualcomm SoCs. At the time, Apple hadn't yet pulled off its third major architecture shift for macOS, from Intel X86 to ARM.

Looking back, products like the Surface Pro X and the myriad ARM for Windows laptops, were basically built to a budget and for portability above all else. They were never competitive with Intel/AMD-based computers. Microsoft seemed to think ARM would always remain in a niche, only used for light, mobility-first devices.

For a recent project, I needed to add cellular connectivity to a Raspberry Pi (actually, an entire cluster... but that's a story for a future time!).

I figured I'd document the process in this blog post so people who follow in my footsteps don't need to spend quite as much time researching. This post is the culmination of 40+ hours of reading, testing, and head-scratching.

There doesn't seem to be any good central resource for "4G LTE and Linux" out there, just a thousand posts about the ABC's of getting an Internet connection working through a 4G modem—but with precious little explanation about why or how it works. (Or why someone should care about random terms like PPP, ECM, QMI, or MBIM, or why someone would choose qmi_wwan over cdc_ether, or ... I could go on).

Hopefully you can learn something from my notes. Or point out places where I'm glaringly wrong :)