Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC
40 comments
·November 21, 2025ndiddy
foxandmouse
The iGPU in Panther Lake has me pretty excited about intel for the first time in a long time. Lunar Lake proved they’re still relevant; Panther Lake will show whether they can actually compete.
ori_b
Forget equal effort: Start off with hardware docs.
userbinator
Qualcomm could've become "the Intel of the ARM PC" if they wanted to, but I suspect they see no problem with (and perhaps have a vested interest in) proprietary closed systems given how they've been doing with their smartphone SoCs.
Unfortunately, even Intel is moving in that direction whenever they're trying to be "legacy free", but I wonder if that's also because they're trying to emulate the success of smartphone SoC vendors.
AlotOfReading
Equal effort is far more likely from Qualcomm than hardware docs. They don't even freely share docs with partners, and many important things are restricted even from their own engineers. I've seen military contractors less paranoid than QCOM.
zettabomb
I'd have to say that full hardware documentation, even under NDA, is prerequisite to claim equal effort. The expectation on a desktop platform (that is, explicitly not mobile, like phones or tablets) is that development is mostly open for those who want to, and Qualcomm's business is sort of fundamentally counter to that. So either they're going to have to change those expectations (which I would prefer not to happen), provide more to manufacturers, or expect that their market performance will be poor.
Marsymars
> I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips.
Depends why the Snapdragon chips were relevant in the first place! I got an ARM laptop for work so that I can locally build things for ARM that we want to be able to deploy to ARM servers.
wryun
Surprising. Cross compilation too annoying to set up? No CI pipelines for things you're actually deploying?
(I'm keen about ARM and RISC-V systems, but I can never actually justify them given the spotty Linux situation and no actual use case)
christophilus
Roughly the same on my Intel Lenovo. It’s a great little machine. And Linux runs nicely.
arjie
I fully expected this. I really wanted to get the Snapdragon X Elite Ideacentre just because I wanted an ARM target to run stuff on and if I'm being honest the Mac Minis are way better price/performance with support. Apple Silicon is far faster than any other ARM processor (Ampere, Qualcomm, anything else) that's easily available with good Linux support.
I am so grateful to the Asahi Linux guys who made this whole thing work. What a tour de force! One day, we'll get the M4 Mac Mini on Asahi and that will be far superior to this Snapdragon X Elite anyway.
I remember working on a Qualcomm dev board over a decade ago and they had just the worst documentation. The hardware wouldn't even respond correctly to what you told it to do. I don't know if that's standard but without the large amount of desire there is to run Linux on Apple Silicon I didn't really anticipate support approaching what Asahi has on M1/M2.
PhilippGille
Related from July:
"Linux on Snapdragon X Elite: Linaro and Tuxedo Pave the Way for ARM64 Laptops"
291 points, 217 comments
userbinator
The first comment there is worth reading again, just for this sentence:
If you want to change some settings oft[sic] the device, you need to use their terrible Electron application.
Incipient
This feels like BAU for PC vendors - you test out a product on a new combination of hardware, and it isn't mature/stable/ready for production, so you kick it down the road to develop later - this is especially true for Linux, where a LOT of the work would be done outside of your organisation.
andrewaylett
While I almost certainly wouldn't have done more than wished for one, it's a shame they're not getting any return for their effort.
rr808
How hard can it be to have an Android laptop? Basically most people just use a browser and the choice of applications is already extensive.
IshKebab
Does anyone know why Linux laptop battery life is so bad? Is it a case of devices needing to be turned off that aren't? Poor CPU scheduling?
jmole
It's ACPI - most laptops ship with half-broken ACPI tables, and provide support for tunables through windows drivers. It's convenient for laptop manufacturers, because Microsoft makes it very easy to update drivers via windows update, and small issues with sleep, performance, etc. can be mostly patched through a driver update.
Linux OTOH can only use the information it has from ACPI to accomplish things like CPU power states, etc. So you end up with issues like "the fans stop working after my laptop wakes from sleep" because of a broken ACPI implementation.
There are a couple of laptops with excellent battery life under linux though, and if you can find a lunar lake laptop with iGPU and IPS screen, you can idle around 3-4W and easily get 12+ hours of battery.
magicalhippo
What's standing in the way of doing something like NDISwrapper but for ACPI? Just that nobody with ghe required skills has spent the effort? Or something technical?
sidewndr46
Don't just leave us hanging, what model number laptops have that great of a battery life?
admash
LG Gram laptops have excellent battery life. E.g. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lightweight-with-power-and-20-...
I have an LG Gram 15 from 2021 and it gets 15+ hours under light usage in Linux.
kijiki
Lunar Lake Lenovo Carbon X1. If you get the IPS screen, you'll get even better than 12 hours.
browningstreet
ACPI has been a problem for Linux for so long now…
jmole
Its not a problem with Linux, it's a problem with laptop manufacturers not caring about designing their ACPI tables and firmware correctly.
JoshTriplett
> Does anyone know why Linux laptop battery life is so bad?
It's extremely dependent on the hardware and driver quality. On ARM and contemporary x86 that's even more true, because (among other things) laptops suspend individual devices ("suspend-to-idle" or "S0ix" or "Modern Standby"), and any one device failing to suspend properly has a disproportionate impact.
That said, to a first approximation, this is a case where different people have wildly different experiences, and people who buy high-end well-supported hardware experience a completely different world than people who install Linux on whatever random hardware they have. For instance, Linux on a ThinkPad has excellent battery life, sometimes exceeding Windows.
gessha
Are there any repositories of documented battery life behavior?
seltzered_
In addition to the other comments, its worth noting macOS started adding developer documentation around energy efficiency, quality of service prioritization, etc. (along with support within its OS) around 2015-2016 when the first fanless usb-c macbook came out: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Pe...
Think I'm arguing its both things where the OS itself can optimize things for battery life along with instilling awareness and API support for it so developers can consider it too.
cosmic_cheese
On top of this, they started encouraging adoption of multithreading and polished up the APIs to make doing so easier even in the early days of OS X, since they were selling PPC G4/G5 towers with dual and eventually quad CPUs.
This meant that by the time they started pushing devs to pay attention to QoS and such, good Mac apps had already been thoroughly multithreaded for years, making it relatively easy to toss things onto lower priority queues.
BadBadJellyBean
My Dell XPS had pretty good battery life on linux. Probably better than on windows. But Dell sells the XPS wiht linux preinstalled. So I assume it has a lot to do with the drivers. Many notebooks have custom chips inside or some weird bios that works together with a windows program. I'd say laptops are more diverse than desktop PCs with of the shelve hardware.
okanat
Newer laptops come with extra power peripherals and sensors. Some of them are in ACPI tables, some are not. Most of them are proprietary ASICs (or custom chips, nuvoton produces quite a bit of those). Linux kernel or the userspace has poor support for those. Kernel PCIe drivers require some tuning. USB stack is kind of shaky and power management features are often turned off since they get unstable as hell.
If you have a dGPU, Linux implementation of the power management or offloading actually consumes more power than Windows due to bad architectural design. Here is a talk from XDC2025 that plans to fix some of the issues: https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/10/contributions/425/
Desktop usage is a third class citizen under Linux (servers first, embedded a distant second). Phones have good battery life since SoC and ODM engineers spend months to tune them and they have first party proprietary drivers. None of the laptop ODMs do such work to support Linux. Even their Windows tooling is arcane.
Unless the users get drivers all the minute PMICs and sensors, you'll never get the battery life you can get from a clean Windows install with all the drivers. MS and especially OEMs shoot themselves in the foot by filling the base OS with so much bloat that Linux actually ends up looking better compared to stock OEM installs.
jcalvinowens
Install powertop, the "tunables" tab has a list of system power saving settings you can toggle through the UI. I've seen them make a pretty big difference, but YMMV of course.
ajvs
A big part of it is chipmakers deprecating S3 sleep in favour of Modern Standby.
WastedCucumber
I ran into this problem on a Slimbook some years ago now. I found that my battery drained way too fast in standby, and I remember determining that this was some (relatively common) problem with sleep states, that some linux machines couldn't really enter/stay in a deeper sleep state, so my Slimbook's standby wasn't much of a standby at all.
But that's just one problem, I bet.
exabrial
I mean I feel like once one of the ARM chipmakers can lend a hand on the software side it should be a landslide.
Google and Samsung managed to make very successful Chromebooks together, but IIRC there was a bunch of back and forth to make the whole thing boot quickly and sip battery power.
tecoholic
What’s the primary need for ARM? Is it because Apple silicon showed a big breakthrough in performance to power with reduced instruction set? While it’s amazing on paper I barely notice a difference on my day to day use between an Intel Ultra and a M2 in performance. Battery life is where they are miles apart.
acomjean
I’m guessing for most people it doesn’t much matter. Most people aren’t writing assembly. They do love an all day battery. I think the competition really helps keep these companies honest.
aidenn0
I'm disappointed, but not surprised.
It's a shame that this didn't end up going anywhere. When Qualcomm was doing their press stuff prior to the Snapdragon X launch, they said that they'd be putting equal effort into supporting both Windows and Linux. If anyone here is running Linux on a Snapdragon X laptop, I'd be curious to know what the experience is like today.
I will say that Intel has kind of made the original X Elite chips irrelevant with their Lunar Lake chips. They have similar performance/battery life, and run cool (so you can use the laptop on your lap or in bed without it overheating), but have full Linux support today and you don't have to deal with x86 emulation. If anyone needs a thin & light Linux laptop today, they're probably your best option. Personally, I get 10-14 hours of real usage (not manufacturer "offline video playback with the brightness turned all the way down" numbers) on my Vivobook S14 running Fedora KDE. In the future, it'll be interesting to see how Intel's upcoming Panther Lake chips compare to Snapdragon X2.