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.
Given the progress being made on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop support under Ubuntu Linux and even with Ubuntu 25.04 now having a nice ARM64 desktop image, I decided to bite the bullet and buy a Snapdragon X Elite laptop finally for testing at Phoronix, with Qualcomm nor any of the other laptop vendors having stepped up in the nearly year since launch. I ended up buying the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop (SF14-11T-X3RZ). This Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 laptop features the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC, 16GB of RAM, a 14.5-inch 2560 x 1600 120Hz 300 nits display, and 1TB NVMe SSD.
The Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 SoC features 12 Oryon CPU cores, 42MB total cache, 3.4GHz maximum multi-core frequency without any boost frequency, and a Qualcomm Adreno GPU rated for 3.8 TFLOPS. The Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 is paired with LPDDR5x-8448 MT/s memory.
The Acer Swift 14 AI SF14-11T has for months been supported by the Ubuntu X1E concept images and the other factor in picking this laptop for carrying out my Linux testing was being the most affordable option as of writing: the Acer SF14-11T-X3RZ can be found for $799 USD at some Internet retailers, a discount of $400 off the Acer list price. Used the Acer SF14-11T can be found for around $600+.
After carrying out some Windows 11 on ARM tests for a future article, I then set out to see what the experience was like for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite now 11 months after launch. I started off using the Ubuntu 25.04 ARM64 desktop image given its new availability and how well that new ARM64 desktop image was working out on the System76 Thelio Astra. After disabling Secure Boot from the Acer BIOS setup screen, I set out to boot the Ubuntu 25.04 desktop ARM64 ISO off USB. As easy as x86_64!
