Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux vs. AMD vs. Intel
Author: Written by Michael Larabel in Processors
June 2024 marked the launch of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite to much initial fanfare for finally some compelling ARM laptop designs. While initially — and still to this day with the likes of the TUXEDO X Elite laptop not materializing yet — being focused on Windows 11 on ARM, there was hope among Linux users this would lead to a nice ARM Linux laptop experience, since after all Qualcomm and Linaro were working on enhancing the support for Linux. Now approaching the one year point, the overall state of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite support and performance is rather disappointing. Here’s a look at where things currently are and performance relative to AMD Ryzen and Intel Core Ultra when making use of the latest Ubuntu Linux support.
Ubuntu Linux has been at the forefront of trying to provide a nice Qualcomm X Elite Linux experience. Going back months they’ve been shipping a Ubuntu 24.10 developer preview / concept image for use on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops (Snapdragon X Plus isn’t yet supported to the extent of the X Elite SoC) and Canonical engineers worked on more X1E improvements for Ubuntu 25.04. They’ve been relying in large part on the various Snapdragon X DeviceTree additions making it into the upstream Linux kernel and other kernel/driver upstream support work for enabling the X Elite SoC support and other components being found in the range of Microsoft Copilot+ AI ARM laptops.
