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At Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit 2023 in Maui, the company announced the Snapdragon X Elite chipset. It's part of a new family of Snapdragon X branded SoCs that uses its Oryon CPU core. Oryon was announced at Snapdragon Summit in 2022, but that was all it said at the time.

Now, we know a lot more.

What is Qualcomm Oryon?

Oryon is the name of the CPU cores in certain chipsets from Qualcomm, including the Snapdragon X Elite and a whole bunch of upcoming products. What makes these different from the Kryo cores that the company was previously using is that these are custom Arm cores.

Back in January 2021, Qualcomm bought a company called Nuvia. Nuvia was working on custom Arm silicon, and Qualcomm wanted that so it could better compete with Apple, which also makes custom chips. The reason that the messaging gets a little messy is because, well, Qualcomm doesn't want to say the word "Nuvia" anymore.

Nuvia doesn't exist. When asked if Oryon was the Nuvia chip, a spokesperson said, "The creation of our custom CPU was started by Nuvia engineers while employed at Nuvia and, after the acquisition of Nuvia by Qualcomm Technologies, the custom CPU was completed by engineers at Qualcomm Technologies." That might sound like two different teams worked on it, but to be very clear, all that happened is that the Nuvia engineers became Qualcomm engineers.

Snapdragon X Elite (8)

The way Qualcomm's processors previously worked was by licensing the cores from Arm. That's why you'll hear terms like Cortex-X4, Cortex-A720, and Cortex-A520 when it comes to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. These are all cores that are designed by Arm. You'll see MediaTek use similar CPU cores in its Dimensity 9300. These CPUs end up being similar because the core design is off-the-shelf.

With Oryon, Qualcomm is using an architectural license. That means that Arm is going to license the instruction set to Qualcomm (ignoring context around legal issues, which aren't relevant to this explanation), and then Qualcomm builds the architecture on its own. There are no more Cortex cores, since Qualcomm is going to be designing them itself. The only thing Oryon needs to do is speak the same language.

Interestingly enough, this isn't the first time that Qualcomm has designed its own Arm processor, although it is the first one to be 64-bit. Back in the old days of the Snapdragon 800 and before that, Krait was developed using an architectural license. It was with the Snapdragon 808 and Snapdragon 810 that the San Diego firm switched to Arm designs with Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A57.

What Qualcomm Oryon is not

Qualcomm Oryon is not a product. It is not a chip, but instead it's just a component of a chip. In fact, it's more of a component of a component of a chipset, since it's just part of the CPU.

It's also not anything but a CPU core. For example, Oryon cores can't show up in the GPU or the NPU. That's not how it works. In fact, Qualcomm already makes a custom GPU and NPU with Adreno and Hexagon, respectively.

When are we expecting to see Qualcomm Oryon products?

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X Elite on October 26 at Snapdragon Summit in Maui, and promised that laptops using it will start shipping in mid-2024. Also, don't expect products to be announced much earlier than that, despite the fact that CES announcements often don't ship until April through June. These announcements will come later than that.

The Snapdragon X Elite badge on the palmrest of a laptop.

President and CEO Cristiano Amon has been talking about these custom chips since the company acquired Nuvia, and how they'll allow the company to compete with Apple Silicon. Indeed, the benchmark scores are there. After seven years, this is supposed to be the product that brings Windows on Arm to maturity.

Following that, Oryon is going to make its way to mobile, which Qualcomm confirmed at its launch this year. Oryon will be in its 2024 flagship mobile product, which will presumably be called the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. It could do a rebrand like it did with its PC chips, but it's less likely since Snapdragon 8 has more brand recognition.

But that's not all. Qualcomm Oryon cores will also come to more tiers of PC platforms. Snapdragon X is the brand for anything with Oryon cores, and there will be more entry-level versions of that than what we're getting now with the Snapdragon X Elite.

Finally, you can absolutely expect Oryon cores to show up in other verticals for Qualcomm. It's an in-house custom CPU core; there's no reason it wouldn't be used everywhere.

Why you should care

As we've known since Qualcomm acquired Nuvia, this is huge, and it's huge for the Windows ecosystem as a whole. One reason is that Qualcomm can now own the full stack of development of its processors. You see, licensing Arm's processor designs means that for a good eight to 10 months before a new chipset is announced, we have a good idea of what kinds of cores will be included. With Qualcomm designing Oryon from the ground up, it can operate in the same way that Intel, AMD, and Apple do.

That means that it can sample Oryon-based chips with OEMs a good 12 to 18 months ahead of time like those companies want, and Qualcomm can keep them under lock and key until it's ready to unveil them. And just maybe, it will allow Qualcomm to have a big bang product launch like Intel and AMD have every year, where they launch new mobile processors at a show like CES, and there are a ton of laptops announced alongside them.

Snapdragon X Elite (10)

So, that's one reason you should care, that it allows Qualcomm to truly compete with rivals like Intel, AMD, and Apple by sharing a model. You should also care because these chips will unlock new capabilities in Windows laptops.

The things most people want from PCs are performance, battery life, great thermals (everyone hates noisy fans), for it to work with all of our apps and peripherals, and a slim and light form factor. No one is doing all of those things. Intel and AMD have performance, but for battery life and fanless designs, you have to go Qualcomm. Compatibility is another area where x86, meaning Intel and AMD, wins.

In the overall computing landscape, the only one doing all of that is Apple. Apple's lineup of Macs with custom Arm processors have the performance you need to do any kind of creative work, battery life lasts all day, thermals are good enough to create devices that simply can't be done with an Intel processor, and of course, the Cupertino firm has enough control over its ecosystem that it was able to get apps and peripherals in line.

This is the kind of hardware we can expect to see from Qualcomm Oryon. In short, the reason you should care about this is because it's the groundwork for Qualcomm to be behind some of the best laptops that hit the market in 2024.