At the 2022 Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm announced the name of the custom CPU cores that it is expected to officially launch in 2024, called Oryon. While it is unclear how many SKUs the company intends to release several months from now, we might get some much-needed competition in the ARM-based notebook space.
Qualcomm Did Not Offer Additional Details on Oryon, but Current-Generation Windows Notebooks Will Continue to Feature CPUs Based on ARM’s Design
It is likely that Qualcomm will stick with the Snapdragon branding when launching its first SoC featuring custom CPU designs, so Oryon could be the name of the cores rather than the silicon itself. In any case, the San Diego-based firm did not share any light on valuable details surrounding these CPU cores other than the fact that they exist and will be found in machines of the future.
Thankfully, there have been rumors and leaks as to what Qualcomm is up to, so we will gladly share those details with you. Codenamed ‘Hamoa,’ this SoC is based on the Nuvia Phoenix design and is expected to be a 12-core part with eight performance cores and four power-efficiency ones. The initial performance results happen to be promising, according to the rumor, and the devices sporting these chips will also support dedicated graphics cards, likely through the Thunderbolt interface and using an external GPU enclosure.
This is certainly exciting news since it means that Apple’s M1 and M2 will get some competition in the market. Unfortunately, given that these Oryon custom cores will launch in 2024, Qualcomm might already be several generations behind and may have to compete against Apple’s M3 or even M4. Then again, Qualcomm could make adjustments accordingly, and apart from a name, there is nothing else to go by at this time.
We do not even know which manufacturing process Qualcomm intends to use when launching its first Snapdragon chipset with Oryon cores, though given the timeframe, the SoC could be mass-produced on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process or Samsung’s second-generation 3nm GAA architecture. For 2023, we will probably be greeted with the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 that utilizes ARM cores, so the real excitement should happen a year after.
