Back in May we provided an initial look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptop performance on Ubuntu Linux with the upstream support for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E maturing, more laptops becoming supported, and the Ubuntu X1E “Concept” ISOs enhancing the end-user experience. The performance was okay but short of expectations. Months later we are revisiting the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux performance on the newest Ubuntu Concept ISOs and newer firmware that is providing a much better experience albeit still not as competitive as the newest AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and Intel Core Ultra laptops under Linux.
Since the May testing, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux testing was experiencing a hiatus… Newer Ubuntu X1E Concept ISOs were failing to properly work on the Acer Swift AI 14 laptop that I had purchased to carry out these Linux tests. Repeatedly the new refreshed media for several months failed to boot properly on the laptop due to Device Tree issues and/or other problems over time. Fortunately, the newest Ubuntu X1E Concept ISOs from late August fixed those problems. So I have been able to carry out clean, working installs of Ubuntu again on this Acer Swift 14 AI laptop powered by an X1 Elite SoC.
The “plucky-desktop-arm64+x1e-20250827.iso” as the newest as of testing now has everything in place so the laptop I have been using for testing works out. Though caveats still apply like you will want to keep around the Microsoft Windows 11 on ARM installation in order to run qcom-firmware-extract for extracting the necessary firmware from the Windows partitions. Most Snapdragon X laptops still do not have any firmware permitted for redistribution in upstream linux-firmware.git and thus the workaround of needing to fetch it from a Windows partition is needed for getting features like GPU acceleration and other functionality working.
Keeping the Windows 11 installation is also important for easily applying system firmware updates to the device itself. While working through these Ubuntu Linux woes on the Acer Swift 14 AI, a system firmware update came down and was applied that ended up being very important for multi-core performance as I’ll be showing in this article.
It’s far from a pleasant out-of-the-box experience but at least an easier route than the likes of Apple Silicon on Linux.
For today’s benchmarking is a look at how the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite performance has evolved since the tests earlier this year and then followed by a comparison of the Acer Swift 14 AI up against an assortment of other Intel Core and AMD Ryzen laptops tested over the summer, all on Ubuntu 25.04 and tested within the Phoronix lab.
