Qualcomm Oryon processor unveiled
Qualcomm held the Snapdragon Technology Summit from November 15th to November 17th and announced a new Oryon processor, which uses a custom core of NUVIA technology and is compatible with the Arm instruction set. Qualcomm did not disclose too many details, such as the manufacturing process used, and Oryon is not necessarily the final name, it may be similar to Kryo, but the name of the CPU core and the corresponding platform are still named after Snapdragon.
Earlier reports said that Qualcomm’s first chip based on NUVIA technology, code-named “Hamoa”, may be used in both laptops and desktops. Its CPU has 12 cores, which are 8 performance cores and 4 custom-designed energy efficiency cores. The memory and cache are very similar to Apple’s M1 chip design, and it is also equipped with a dedicated GPU. Laptops equipped with this chip can connect to an external discrete graphics card through the Thunderbolt port, which is not possible with the current Macbook series products equipped with M-series chips.
Qualcomm acquired NUVIA for US$1.4 billion in January 2021. The startup was founded in 2019 by Gerard Williams III, John Bruno, and Manu Gulati, who have decades of industry experience working at AMD, Apple, ARM, Broadcom, and Google. It is rumored that Qualcomm’s Oryon processor, whose prototype is NUVIA’s early code-named “Phoenix” design.
It is expected that Qualcomm’s partners will launch the first batch of consumer notebooks with new chips in 2024, which is expected to have a certain impact on the Windows On Arm ecosystem. Although it is rumored that the preliminary performance test results of Qualcomm’s new chip are relatively satisfactory, judging from the timetable, when it is actually put into the market, it may have to compete with Apple’s M3 or even M4 chip.
