Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux vs. AMD vs. Intel
👁 Acer Swift 14 AI with Ubuntu Linux 25.04
When on the Ubuntu 25.04 upgraded system, WiFi was back to working unlike on Ubuntu 24.10. But the battery information reporting wasn't working. Also not working yet from this Acer SF14-11T-X3RZ was the sound: no working speakers with just the dummy output available. Similarly, no microphone detected either. And the web camera wasn't detected either. LLVMpipe software acceleration was still in use but enabled once installing qcom-firmware-extract to fetch the firmware binaries from the Windows parttition which also enabled the battery reporting integration.
👁 X Elite powered Acer Swift 14 AI with missing Linux functionality
At least the Acer SF14 Snapdragon X Elite laptop was booting with Ubuntu 25.04 and I had working WiFi and a touchpad/keyboard as the most fundamental items. But with no audio, no web camera, and other limited functionality if not having the Windows partition still around for manually installing qcom-firmware-extract to fetch the firmware blobs, it's a rather rough experience especially for someone that may be wanting to buy the laptop for use as a daily system rather than just as an enthusiast/reviewer/tinkering system with ARM64 Linux.
👁 X Elite powered Acer Swift 14 AI on Linux
When moving onto the performance testing both under Ubuntu 24.10 and Ubuntu 25.04, there was another big fault. Some of the power management handling evidently isn't properly wired up yet... Under load this laptop would get incredibly hot to the point of the system turning itself off during the benchmarks. It was very hot to the touch and after some minutes of intensive workloads the Acer Swift 14 AI would turn itself off. The powering off behavior occurred less often after having run qcom-firmware-extract but still happened during stressful benchmarking and regardless of firmware became very hot during multi-threaded workloads.
👁 X Elite powered Acer Swift 14 AI under Linux
Another frustrating element from the benchmarking perspective was the lack of any PowerCap/RAPL power reporting under Linux, like can be found with AMD and Intel CPUs and others for power monitoring just of the SoC/CPU under Linux. Or similarly no HWMON driver that is available for some ARM vendors like Ampere. Thus during the benchmarking I couldn't effectively measure just the SoC/CPU power itself like I do with AMD and Intel laptops on Linux. Paired with some components not properly working to make for it being less than ideal to compare overall power consumption, I don't have any power numbers to share for today's Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux testing.
This experience the past few weeks with the Acer Swift SF14-11T-X3RZ was rather disappointing and frustrating for being a nearly year-old platform. With AMD Ryzen and Intel Core laptops there are sometimes web camera issues, WiFi issues if not on a new enough kernel or missing firmware, or suspend/resume headaches, but 99% of the time nothing as limited and asterisk-ridden as this Snapdragon X Elite laptop on Linux in mid-2025. And then when looking at other Snapdragon X Elite laptops, the support expectations there vary as you can see from looking at the various DeviceTree patches and other documentation.
In the year since the Snapdragon X Elite launched, Intel Lunar Lake launched with a nice step-up to the power efficiency and the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series is delivering great power/performance too. While unfortunately being unable to deliver any power/performance-per-Watt metrics for this Snapdragon X Elite laptop versus AMD Ryzen and Intel due to the mentioned issues, I did carry out some benchmarks compared to various Intel and AMD laptops atop Ubuntu 25.04.
The Acer Swift 14 Snapdragon X Elite benchmarks were done on both Ubuntu 24.10 X1E Concept and when upgraded to Ubuntu 25.04 for reference. All the other laptops were on clean installs of Ubuntu 25.04.