Snapdragon X Elite will support Linux

Qualcomm has announced that the Snapdragon X Elite will support the Linux operating system. The new processor has garnered attention for its impressive performance on Windows on Arm PCs, and Qualcomm has continually supported Linux by providing patches for the Linux kernel, facilitating the deployment of Linux on Arm-based PCs.

Qualcomm is currently collaborating with Lenovo, Arm, and Linaro to develop the AArch64 laptop GitHub project. Snapdragon processors capable of running Windows also support Linux, ensuring users can boot Linux on devices powered by Qualcomm’s SoCs, including the Lenovo Yoga C630 (Snapdragon 850), Flex 5G (first-generation Snapdragon 8), and ThinkPad X13s (third-generation Snapdragon 8cx). Typically, Qualcomm releases Linux kernel support patches within a day or two of launching a new Snapdragon chip, and the latest Snapdragon X Elite is no exception.

Qualcomm has already added several features to the Linux kernel for the Snapdragon X Elite, including SSD-NVMe over PCIe, sound drivers, Phy (PCIe / eDP / USB), reference board support (CRD / QCP), and system cache. The company plans to further optimize CPU and GPU performance, battery life, video decoding, camera support, and provide support for easy installation of Linux distributions.

The Snapdragon X Elite is manufactured using TSMC’s 4nm process and is equipped with 12 custom Oryon cores, with a maximum clock speed of 4.3 GHz. Additionally, it features a 45 TOPS NPU and an integrated Adreno GPU offering 4.6 TOPS of compute performance. The new platform supports LPDDR5X memory with a rate of 8533 MT/s and a maximum capacity of 64GB, corresponding to a peak bandwidth of 136 GB/s. Besides supporting PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs, it will also support UFS 4.0 storage, along with 5G, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4.