Over the past 18 months, we have been working on ARM notebooks based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X1 Elite SoC (X1E). At this point, we are stopping this project. There are several reasons for this.
less than expected
Development proved challenging due to the differing architectures, and in the end, the first generation X1E proved to be less suitable for Linux than expected. In particular, long battery runtime – usually one of the strong arguments for ARM devices – was not achieved under Linux. A viable approach to BIOS updates under Linux is also missing at this stage, as is fan control. Virtualization with KVM is not expected on our model, nor are high USB4 transfer rates. Video hardware decoding is technically possible, but most applications lack the necessary support.
Given these conditions, it does not seem prudent to invest several more months of development time, as it cannot be predicted that all the features you can reasonably expect will eventually be available. In addition, we will present you a device with a more than two-year-old Snapdragon
restart possible
We will continue to monitor development and will evaluate X2E for Linux suitability in due course. If it meets expectations and we can reuse a significant portion of our work on X1E, we can resume development. How much of our groundwork can be transferred to the X2E can only be assessed after a detailed evaluation of the chip.
Many thanks to Linaro
We would like to express our gratitude to Linaro’s ARM experts for their excellent cooperation. we will contribute device tree We developed the mainline kernel along with further work and thereby helped improve Linux support for compatible devices, such as the Median SUPRCHRGD, and thus made our work available to the community.