本文由半导体产业纵横（ID：ICVIEWS）编译自tomshardware
Most of the features are there, but many important parts are still under development.
Qualcomm has made good progress in tuning its new Snapdragon X Elite laptop CPU for Linux. The mobile SoC maker has revealed that it has laid a lot of groundwork for the Snapdragon X Elite to run the Linux operating system. However, Qualcomm is far from done, as there is still a lot of development work required to get the X Elite fully operational in Linux. The upcoming Linux kernel should be able to fully support all of the chip's features.
Qualcomm prides itself on its Linux support efforts and prioritizes Linux support in all of its previous Snapdragon laptop CPUs, usually announcing Linux support a day or two after launch. The Snapdragon X Elite Edition continues this pattern, announcing support for Linux the day after its debut on October 23, 2023.
This is in stark contrast to Apple, which so far hasn't provided much official support for Linux – Asahi Linux continues to work on supporting M1 and M2 processors, as well as M3 and Apple M4 chips, but most of the work seems to be coming from the community, not Apple itself.
So far, most of Qualcomm's key features have been running inside Linux, especially the Linux 6.9 version that was released not long ago. These key features include EFI-based boot support and all standard bootloaders such as Grub and system-d. Dual booting is also possible for users who want to run both Windows and Linux installations on X Elite-powered computers.
Other key features that have been implemented include DWC3 sound drivers, reference board support, ADSP/CDSP support, multimedia clocks, PCIe/eDP/USB PHYs, and system caching via NVMe SSDs over PCIe.
Features being developed in future iterations of Linux include battery support, onboard display connectivity, external DisplayPort connectivity, sleep and wake features on the GPU, camera support, video support, better CPU frequency support, and speaker/mic/headphone support. These functions are expected to arrive in Linux 6.10 and 6.11.
Qualcomm is also working on issues related to the UEFI boot process related to the device tree. There is now an issue where there is no standard way to select the device tree to pass to the Linux kernel if multiple device tree blobs are packaged into a firmware package that is flashed to an X Elite laptop.
In addition, Qualcomm has provided a 6-month roadmap of features, which is still in development. These features include end-to-end hardware video decoding in Firefox and Chrome, GPU and CPU performance optimizations, power optimizations (pending/DCVS), and easier/more accessible Ubuntu and Debian installations for Qualcomm X Elite users.
For die-hard Linux enthusiasts, Qualcomm provides the Debian installer with an experimental raw disk image at your own risk. Technically, Linux now runs on Snapdragon X Elite processors, but Qualcomm's implementation is far from complete, which means you may run into bugs and many features that don't work.
Qualcomm once again challenged the X86
Following the launch of the flagship Windows PC processor Snapdragon X Elite at the Snapdragon Technology Summit last year, Qualcomm recently launched a new product for the high-end PC market - the Snapdragon X Plus processor.
According to information released by Qualcomm, the Snapdragon X Plus is a high-end ARM PC processor product. Its CPU part adopts a 10-core design, with a maximum frequency of 3.4GHz, and the process technology is a leading 4nm.
The Qualcomm Adreno GPU delivers 3.8TFLOPS, and the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU brings 45TOPS, making it the fastest NPU among laptop processors known.
It is worth noting that in a number of public benchmarks, the overall performance of the Snapdragon X Plus has surpassed the Core Ultra 7 155H, the main force in Intel's current mobile PCs.
In contrast, the Snapdragon X Plus provides higher single-threaded and multi-threaded processing power at the same power consumption, and the GPU graphics computing performance is also stronger, so it can be inferred that laptops with Snapdragon X Plus can bring longer battery life, higher processing efficiency, and a smarter user experience. But unfortunately, Qualcomm didn't show more details of the practical application as it did when it introduced the Snapdragon X Elite.
The launch of Snapdragon X Plus can be described as another round of strong challenge launched by ARM to the traditional x86 processor + WIndows camp after X Elite.
Although Qualcomm has not yet revealed its long-term plans in the field of PC processors in detail, through the release of two consecutive products, it can be clearly felt that Qualcomm is accelerating its entry into the field of PC processors and actively deploying in the ARM Windows ecosystem. The rise of artificial intelligence technology is also accelerating the reshaping of traditional PCs, and AI PCs have brought historic development opportunities for Qualcomm to enter the PC field.
The advent of the AI era is subverting this traditional pattern. AI computing requires large-scale parallel data processing capabilities, making it difficult for CPUs to work alone. Specialized AI accelerators such as GPU, TPU, and NPU are incorporated into the heterogeneous design of chips to make up for the lack of AI computing power of CPUs.
Among them, NPU, as a chip specializing in AI training and inference, plays a pivotal role in the AI era. CPU is no longer the only indicator to measure chip performance, AI computing power is the new trump card. This change has opened up an opportunity for the ARM camp in the PC space.
The ARM architecture itself has relatively mature support for AI accelerators, and ARM chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm have been working in mobile AI, edge AI and other fields for a long time. Especially Qualcomm, as early as 2015, the Snapdragon 820 mobile phone chip was equipped with the first generation of AI Engine.
In 2018, the Hexagon NPU in the Snapdragon 855 added the Hexagon tensor accelerator to further improve AI performance. In 2020, Qualcomm Hexagon NPU ushered in a revolutionary architecture update, integrating vector, tensor, and scalar accelerators to achieve better performance and power consumption.
These accumulations have allowed Qualcomm to accumulate rich experience in AI chip design on mobile phones, and also laid the foundation for its subsequent expansion of AI acceleration chips to PCs and other broader fields.
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