For your viewing pleasure today are the first Linux benchmarks of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme on Linux using the new Ubuntu 26.10 X1E Concept ISO for Snapdragon X laptop support on Linux. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme flagship SoC is tested within the ASUS Zenbook A16 UX3607OA laptop.

Thanks to Phoronix reader David for providing remote testing of the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme / ASUS Zenbook A16, up today are the first numbers from the new Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 series. Unfortunately I haven't received any Snapdragon X2 series review samples from Qualcomm or their hardware partners, but thanks to Phoronix reader David for allowing some remote benchmarks to be conducted to get an initial idea for how the X2 Elite Extreme is performing under Linux in its very fresh state. With that said, this is just the preliminary benchmarks, some benchmarks did not run successfully on the X2, and there is also no power monitoring. With no PowerCap/RAPL or other Linux reporting of Snapdragon X power metrics under Linux and no external power monitoring like via a WattsUp Pro during this remote testing, unfortunately, no coverage of that very important aspect in this round of testing. And, sadly, the hardware budget for the year depleted. Hopefully we'll find our hands on some review hardware in the future to be able to conduct power testing and other more extensive Linux performance benchmarking of the Snapdragon X2 series.

The ASUS Zenbook A16 UX3607OA features the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E96100 with 48GB of LPDDR5-9523 MT/s memory. The 18-core Qualcomm X2 Elitte Extreme X2E96100 has a single-core boost frequency of 5.0GHz, and multi-core max frequency up to 4.4GHz. The Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme is reported to have a 20W to 40W TDP for standard designs or up to 65W for the CPU under sustained workloads. Again, no power / perf-per-Watt testing was possible with this initial round of remote testing.

The Ubuntu 26.10 X1E Concept ISO was used on this laptop for standard functionality. Not yet supported out-of-the-box are WiFi, audio, and the web camera. The Snapdragon X2 Linux driver support continues to improve with future Linux kernel releases; the X1E Concept ISO is currently on Linux 7.3 like upstream Ubuntu 26.10.

It was nice to see even the Adreno graphics of the X2 Elite Extreme were working on the Ubuntu 26.10 state with the open-source Qualcomm driver stack.

In comparison, my Snapdragon X1 Elite Acer Swift 14 AI laptop was still having problems with graphics on the Ubuntu 26.10 concept image and falling back to LLVMpipe...

For getting an idea of the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme performance I ran fresh benchmarks against several other laptops on-hand using the new Ubuntu 26.10 state. The newly re-tested laptops for comparison to this X2 Elite Extreme included the Core Ultra 9 285H - StarFighter Ultra, Core Ultra X9 388H - Framework 13 Pro, Ryzen AI 9 365 - Zenboook S16, Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 - Framework 13, and Snapdragon X1 Elite - Acer Swift 14 AI. This provides a look at the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme on Linux against current AMD Zen 5 Strix Point (no Strix Halo laptop on-hand unfortunately for testing) as well as Intel Arrow Lake and Panther Lake. Plus the prior-gen Snapdragon X1 Elite for comparison.