Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux Performance Improving But Short Of AMD Ryzen & Intel Core Ultra
👁 Acer Swift 14 AI Snapdragon laptop with Ubuntu 25.04
Out of the 130+ benchmarks that ran successfully on the X1 Elite compared to the wide assortment of Intel/AMD laptops I have been testing this summer, here is the geometric mean for the X Elite performance with the Acer Swift 14 AI on Linux right now:
That is with the new Ubuntu X1E Concept ISO on Linux 6.17 and the much-improved Acer system firmware. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite was able to perform similar to the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" overall within the Acer Swift Go 14 laptop. The Snapdragon laptop was behind the previous generation AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. With the new Ubuntu X1E Concept image and updated Acer system firmware, this is a big improvement over the experience back in May. With those original tests the geo mean put the Snapdragon X Elite around the performance of the Intel Tiger Lake Core i7 1185G7 / 1165G7 SoCs and at around 80% the performance seen of where we are at today. Some very sold improvements from the past few months albeit unfortunate that during this time the Ubuntu X1E Concept ISOs have been very unreliable for this laptop that has now been in the marketplace for the past year with Microsoft Windows 11 on ARM.
Another nice improvement with these updates have been that the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop no longer shuts off or reboots during demanding workloads where as previously it was likely hitting power/thermal issues. The Acer Swift 14 AI was now more reliable without those annoying reboots/power-off scenarios.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite performance is a step in the right direction but still well behind the latest AMD Ryzen AI 300 series and Intel Core Ultra Series 2 laptops. That is for raw performance and unfortunately not being able to deliver any performance-per-Watt figures due to the lack of any sensors being exposed under Linux for the X1E.
We'll see where the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux performance heads from here and what more performance optimizations may still come -- assuming the laptop doesn't regress with any Device Tree issues like experienced in the past few months.
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