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GPUs and CPUs

Qualcomm Snapdragon X

6owners with an opinion
80%of verdicts positive
4/1positive/negative since 2024
1 yrslongest happy owner
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and noise; criticized for software.

What owners wrote

Doesn’t like itOwned 2 years
This! I've had a Snapdragon X Elite laptop for 2 years, constantly trying to get Linux off the ground on it. Didn't happen (well, technically, toward the end of that period, there was an unsupported port of Ubuntu but it lacked half the drivers). And yes, when I bought it there was a very similar announcement from Qualcomm promising first-class Linux support. So I wouldn't gamble on it (especially considering that prices are crazy) until there indeed is a supported distro.
NeutralOwned 1 year
I've been waiting for someone to write a DTS for a Snapdragon(R) X - X126100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) CPU based laptop I bought over a year ago. Some people are trying but it can't be that easy ... Starting to look into doing it myself and AFAICT it requires reading the ACPI tables (written for Windows drivers), and manually converting it to devicetree, test, tweak, repeat.
Likes itOwned 1 year
MSFT simply has done half-assed attempts at ARM for each wave / attempt over the past 10+ years. APPL, for each processor move, "bet the company" and it was full speed ahead whereas MSFT has never HAD to align everything for a move. Having said all that, I've been using a Snapdragon Elite X laptop since day one and the experience has gotten better over the year plus I've been using it. Once there was a native port of command line git (yes, THAT didn't even work) - my life got a lot better.
Doesn’t like it
This sorta reminds me of the lie that was pushed when the Snapdragon X laptops were being released last year. Qualcomm implied the NPU would be used for LLMs — and I bought into the BS without looking into it. I still use a Snapdragon laptop as my daily driver (it's fine) but for running models locally, it's still a joke. Despite Qualcomm's claims about running 13B parameter models, software like LM Studio only runs on CPU with NPU support merely "planned for future updates." XDA The NPU isn't even faster than the CPU for LLMs — it's just more power-efficient for small models, not the big ones people actually want to run. Their GPUs aren't much better for this purpose either. The only hope for LLMs is the Vulkan support on the Snapdragon X — which still is half-baked.
Likes it
I think parent means "Ampere" being a bad ARM implementation, and Snapdragon X or Apple M-series being the good ones. It's mentioned in the article too. Ampere performs really poorly on idle (101W vs EPYC's meager 19W). I haven't witnessed that problem on my Snapdragon X laptop. I'm not saying Ampere is bad myself though. It's obviously very competitive being a relatively new player and all. But, it's not as polished for desktop/laptop workloads as it seems.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
This. The X1 Elite laptops came out 2+ years ago, but you still need to use a special Ubuntu remix to get everything* working, and support is very dependent on which laptop you bought. You could say it’s not Qualcomm’s job to make audio or the camera work on every Lenovo/Dell/HP, but someone needs to do it… *: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.
Doesn’t like itHasn’t owned it
Given the amount of amazing $500 Ryzen laptops, it's hard for me to think this is a huge win. It also is just abominable how non PC compatible these systems are. I'm not talking about x86 vs arm: that's something we can work with, work through. These systems don't boot via ACPI, they're all carefully cobbled together special hardcode device driver setups (Device Tree on Linux). Some fraction of them are locked down so you can't even install another OS or run the GPU if you do. I'm tired of the never ending Charlie Brown trying to kick the ARM football skit. It's nice to see a core that actually has ok performance after a decade+ of promises, but man, it's not cheap at all and it has so many colossal disadvantages.
Likes itHasn’t owned it
I've seen reviews of the latest 13 inch Dell XPS and it's both more powerful and less energy hungry than the M3 in a MacBook air. It uses the Snapdragon Elite X ARM cpu. It also blows the latest mobile i7 ultra 155H on the same XPS 13 in performance while lasting almost 20 hours (compared to Intel's 6). The comparisons are made on software that runs on both (Geekbench, handbrake) but it's clear that there is a huge momentum building for windows on arm.