Today at the 2022 Snapdragon Technology Summit, Qualcomm announced the name of its next-generation custom Arm core: Oryon. Those cores will be used in chips designed to counter Apple’s custom Arm processors in the M-series, but the company didn’t provide specifics.
Qualcomm acquired Santa Clara-based Nuvia back in January 2021 for $1.4 billion, and Nuvia’s founder, a former chief architect at Apple who oversaw CPU designs from A7 to A14, is working on a custom Arm architecture that Qualcomm needs to compete with Apple, particularly in the area of laptop computing.
Qualcomm’s current CPU cores are based on Arm’s public version architecture, such as the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 with four Cortex-X1 cores and four Cortex-A78 cores, and the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 with a powerful Cortex-X3 core.
Custom chips allow Qualcomm to own the entire stack and no longer rely on Arm to launch its designs. This means it can operate not only like Apple but also like Intel and AMD.
The new Qualcomm Oryon based chip is scheduled to be available for sampling to OEMs in the second half of this year and will be commercially available in 2024.
