Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU will make its debut in 2024, and the company promises it will put on quite a show versus the Windows PC competitive platforms.
One of the more exciting aspects of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon family processors for Windows on Arm64 is that these laptop PCs are always connected (4G or 5G), and they can deliver stellar battery life. Just peruse any of our recent reviews and you can see that, for instance, the Lenovo Flex 5G has more than 24 hours of battery life while playing back video. The downside for these systems historically has been performance versus x86 alternatives, with CPUs that have more in common with tablets and smartphones than full-fledged PCs but with serviceable experiences in a number of mainstream use cases. However, thanks to the company’s new Snapdragon X Elite series of processors, Qualcomm says that’s all about to change. At it’s Snapdragon Summit in Maui, HI today, the company lifted the veil on some details and performance expectations of its new laptop processor series based on its new Oryon CPU core technology.
When Qualcomm teased Snapdragon X a couple of weeks ago, the company said that the new Oryon architecture would revolutionize the way we use PCs. The company has been saying for a while now that it thinks it could even beat Apple at its own Arm-based game. Those are big words and a tall order, but let’s look at what Qualcomm brought to the table here…Snapdragon X Elite’s Secret: The Oryon CPU
We’ve surmised and speculated that the Oryon CPU architecture was based on technology developed as a result of Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia more than 30 months ago. It takes time to design a chip, validate engineering samples and ultimately bring something to market, so the timing seems plausible, but Qualcomm isn’t directly saying it. What it is saying, however, is that the Oryon CPU integrated into Snapdragon X delivers «up to two times faster» CPU performance compared to its x86 competition. We bet you didn’t see that coming, and neither did we.
Built on a four-nanometer process, the Oryon CPU sports 12 high-performance cores running at 3.8 GHz. In situations that call for more single-threaded, or multi-threaded workload performance, a pair of those cores can boost up to 4.3GHz. All of Qualcomm’s diagrams illustrate the Oryon CPU as three clusters with four CPU cores a piece, but we wouldn’t read too much into that. The key takeaway is that this does not seem to be a big.LITTLE design, and all 12 cores seem relatively equal in Qualcomm’s early documentation. And just to confirm, all of those cores are single-threaded only and do not support SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading).
There’s gobs of memory bandwidth on tap, too; the Snapdragon X Elite Compute Platform has support for LPDDR5x memory running at 8533 MT/s for a total aggregate bandwidth of 136 GB per second. That bandwidth funnels into 42 MB of total cache on the Snapdragon X Elite SoC, to keep those 12 cores all fed with data and instructions.Snapdragon X Elite: High-End Performance With Low Power Draw
Using Geekbench 6.1’s multi-threaded tests as a guide, Qualcomm says the Oryon CPU can deliver up to twice the performance of its competitor, and match a competing CPU’s performance with 1/3 of the power required.
