Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite's latest Linux benchmarks show significant regressions, performs similarly to five-year-old Intel Tiger Lake chips — promising chip continues to be plagued by software support issues

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.

The regressions are so bad that in many benchmarks, the test machine actually performed worse than when it was first tested, still under Ubuntu 24.10 without as many enhancements. The situation is currently so dire that the reviewer concluded that performance is back to the level of now-aging Intel Tiger Lake and Ryzen 7 Pro machines. Needless to say, Phoronix advises Linux users to shop for a conventional laptop rather than invest their cash in a Snapdragon machine, at least for the time being.

Things look much rosier on the Windows side of the fence, with 2025 seeing the introduction of an Arm-native Google Drive client, and Adobe launching Arm versions of both Adobe Premiere and After Effects. Likewise, Microsoft's x86-to-Arm emulation layer called Prism saw some fixes and added AVX/AVX2 support.

It's worth noting that the thermal-induced crashes and/or throttling can be caused by simple bad luck with the tester machine, an Acer Swift 14 AI laptop. Although Snapdragon X machines have been known to experience BSOD issues in Windows land due to firmware bugs, the laptops themselves are generally considered high quality and run cool and quiet.

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