For those curious about the Snapdragon X1 Elite performance on the recently released Ubuntu 26.10 Concept X1E ISO, here are some benchmarks showing the performance relative to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS X1E state on the same hardware.

Last week were the first Snapdragon X2 Linux benchmarks using a X2 Elite Extreme with ASUS Zenbook A16 laptop. That testing was done remotely thanks to a Phoronix reader but the great news is Qualcomm will now be sending over a review sample to allow for more Snapdragon X2 Linux benchmarks moving forward. But for those curious how the X1 Elite performance has evolved from Ubuntu 26.04 to 26.10, this article is looking at that using the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop (SF14-11T-X3RZ) that I have been using for all of my Snapdragon X1 Elite benchmarking over the past year and a half.

Unfortunately this Acer Swift 14 AI laptop still appears to be the runt of the litter when it comes to Linux support on the Snapdragon X1 series. On a clean install of the Ubuntu 26.10 X1E Concept ISO, the qcom-firmware-extract utility still needs to be run for obtaining the necessary firmware binaries for different Linux drivers from a Microsoft Windows 11 partition. Thus the Microsoft Windows partition still needs to be maintained on the laptop, which is similar to many other Snapdragon X laptops out there while a few Dell and Lenovo Snapdragon laptops do carry at least some of their firmware blobs in linux-firmware.git for easier maintenance.

After the clean Ubuntu 26.10 X1E Concept install and running qcom-firmware-extract with the firmware binaries, unfortunately, some shortcomings still persist with this Acer Swift 14 AI laptop under Linux.

Battery reporting still wasn't working. WiFi works but during testing for extended periods of time it eventually drops out until rebooting the system. Audio also not working.

Arguably most pressing with this Acer Swift 14 AI laptop is that the GPU driver support had regressed previously and remains that way with Ubuntu 26.10 X1E Concept. Thus falling back to LLVMpipe. The MSM DRM kernel driver complains of not being able to power up the GPU, though the Adreno graphics work on other Snapdragon X1 laptops and did previously work for this Acer laptop.

Another regression that I only realized a few days ago is that this Acer SF14-11T-X3RZ laptop now identifiers as an 8-core CPU rather than 12-core. I went back and found this to regress since Ubuntu 26.04. The SF14-11T-X3RZ features the X1E-78100 12-core processor while since Ubuntu 26.04 on the software side at least is being imagined as an 8 core processor.

Long story short, there are a number of poor spots still for Linux on the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop (SF14-11T-X3RZ) even with the new Ubuntu 26.10 X1E Concept ISO. At least with the ASUS Zenbook A16 coming I am very much looking forward to that and its better Linux support as well as better performance thanks to the X2 Elite Extreme.

Curious about any performance changes from Ubuntu 26.04 to 26.10 on the X1 Elite, I ran some benchmarks comparing the CPU performance. Namely the jump from Linux 7.0 to Linux 7.3, the minor compiler bump from GCC 15.2 to GCC 15.3, and other package upgrades over the past six months.