The dominance of AMD and Intel could be coming to an end if Qualcomm has its way with its new ARM processors. ARM continues to make headlines with Qualcomm and Apple releasing incredibly powerful desktop and mobile processors and now the former has unveiled support for Linux is already in the works. Qualcomm’s efforts will see Snapdragon X Elite processors booting on Linux and Windows-powered systems.
The company has already upstreamed numerous patchsets for merging into the Linux kernel, including NVMe over PCIe, sound machine driver, PMC8380 PMIC, Pinctrl (TLMM), Phy (PCIe/eDP/USB), reference board support (CRD/QCP), and system cache. These were loaded into Linux kernels 6.8 and 6.9 and shows a strong commitment to supporting not only Windows but the alternative operating systems.
Why is this a big deal for Linux?
Qualcomm showing love for Linux is a massive step forward for the company and the Linux community. Many important features have already made their way into patches but Qualcomm has more in the works for Linux kernel 6.10 and 6.11, including battery, USB host, GPU, external DP, suspend/resume, video, camera, and speakers/microphone/headset.
The Snapdragon X Elite is a powerful CPU, featuring 12 cores that can run up to speeds of 4.3 GHz. It’s a system-on-chip (SoC) design with an Adreno GPU that can handle 4.6 TFLOPs for gaming and other GPU-intensive tasks. And as AI is all the rave right now, the Snapdragon X Elite boasts 45 TOPs for AI-specific workloads.
The roadmap for the next six months includes work in end-to-end hardware video decoding on Firefox and Chrome, CPU and GPU optimizations, power optimizations, making firmware openly available through Linux-firmware, and access to easy installers on Ubuntu and Debian.
Qualcomm published an experimental disk image for a Debian installer and is asking the wider community to monitor their work on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) archive (search for "X1E80100") to inform them of what needs to be added. It’s exciting times ahead for the Linux platform and the PC industry as a whole with more competition gearing up for an expansive launch.
Looking ahead at new Snapdragon PCsWe likely won’t see much in terms of Qualcomm hardware running Linux outside of laptops and other portable devices, but it’ll be interesting to see how far Qualcomm takes its new chips with the desktop market ripe for the taking. May 20th is just around the corner when we'll see a host of devices launch with the new Qualcomm chip and I cannot see Linux being too far behind with this work.
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