Qualcomm’s flagship next-gen processor for laptops, based on a new CPU core, looks to be a high-performance efficiency monster—if you believe the hype. We’ll be checking it out this week at the company’s annual Snapdragon Summit.
MAUI, Hawaii—At the opening keynote of the 2023 Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm representatives broke out the speeds and feeds in force and detailed the first SoC in the company’s Snapdragon X Elite line, powered by its much-anticipated next-gen CPU core, code-named “Oryon.” Teased earlier in the month, “Snapdragon X” is the branding for Qualcomm’s newest SoCs for PC compute, and the Snapdragon Elite X is the first issue, positioned as its premium solution. Outfitted for AI local processing and packing a host of efficiency-minded innovations, the Snapdragon X Elite built on Oryon is, according to Qualcomm, the punchiest processor for laptops that it has ever produced.
Indeed, it’s the subject of a lot of impressive (you might even say, gaudy) claims around its conventional compute performance, its AI inferencing aptitude, and the overall power efficiency. Snapdragon claims that the Oryon chip will be scalable across a wide range of laptop form factors: thin ultraportables, flexible 2-in-1s, even large-screen power machines. So, how did Qualcomm get here?First, a Bit of Snapdragon Compute Background
Qualcomm, of course, is very well known for its chips and supporting components that go into modern smartphones. It’s much less well known for its CPU efforts in PC laptops to date.
The broader “Snapdragon X” is the follow-on to the company’s Snapdragon 8cx, an Arm-based CPU line that appeared in a smattering of laptops over the last few years. The 8cx designs also showed up, in rebranded form, as the SQ1, SQ2, and SQ3 in a subset of Microsoft’s Surface Pro detachable 2-in-1s, most recently the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 (SQ3).
The 8cx has appeared in three generations: the original 8cx (2018), the 8cx Gen 2 (2020), and the 8cx Gen 3 (2021), and was Qualcomm’s first purpose-built line of SoCs for laptop computers. (Earlier appearances of Snapdragon on PCs were higher-TDP implementations of the company’s smartphone processors.)
Despite 8cx chips posting some impressive numbers in isolated benchmark tests (mainly of battery life, including some of PCMag’s own), performance has generally been underwhelming, and the number of design wins tiny relative to the broad adoption of classic Intel Core and AMD Ryzen mobile processors. Also, the 8cx chips’ Arm design and non-x86 nature have led to some issues with broad software compatibility compared with classic x86 designs. That has limited 8cx’s wider appeal.
The 8cx chips were built around a CPU core that Qualcomm dubbed Kryo. Oryon is a newer CPU core that will power the conventional compute in Snapdragon X Elite. It was announced at 2022’s Snapdragon Summit and will underpin future Qualcomm initiatives in areas including laptop, mobile phone, automotive, and mixed reality experiences. It’s a custom core (rather than a licensed-from-Arm core) and a product, in part, of the company’s 2021 acquisition of Nuvia, a server-silicon startup founded by a group of senior Apple execs involved in the development of Apple Silicon—today’s most successful Arm-based processor platform for laptops.
We expect to see Snapdragon X Elite and Oryon in action later in the Snapdragon Summit, integrated into partner laptops onsite. For now, let’s break down the specs and surrounding details that Qualcomm has shared so far.Oryon at the Core
Oryon (pronounced like “Orion,” the star system) in its initial offering is a 12-core Arm CPU core, custom-designed by Qualcomm, built on 64-bit architecture and 4nm process technology. It’s the successor to the Kryo used in Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (5nm process) and earlier 8cx efforts.
The overall boost clock on these 12 cores is 3.8GHz, with the ability (a bit like Intel chips with their various Turbo Boost and Turbo Boost Max technologies) to boost just one or two cores to 4.3GHz. According to Qualcomm, this limited acceleration should manifest in faster application launch times, better web browsing responsiveness, and snappier UI.
