Things aren’t looking too rosy for Snapdragon X Elite PCs. Although they made an initial splash in the market, combining excellent battery life with mid- to high-end performance, the machines’ popularity suffered due to software support issues. As an example, Phoronix ran Linux performance tests on the SoC, and there have been significant regressions in just a few months.
Phoronix’s software setup is arguably a best-case scenario for the chip as of this writing. The site used the latest Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka” release, with the X1E Concept packages added. The distro offers about as fresh a stable kernel as you can get, while the X1E packages add Snapdragon-specific enhancements, most of them courtesy of the Linaro consortium.
Given that progress on Arm64 support on Linux has been improving at a fairly nice clip, as evidenced by the now-present nested virtualization support and Guarded Control Stack (GCS), you’d expect the fresh version to be an upgrade. Alas, compared to testing done in September, Phoronix saw rather significant regressions in performance and thermal behavior — quite the odd double-whammy.
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