“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] (pcmag.com/…/qualcomm-teases-next-gen-snapdragon-x…), “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.”
“the punchiest processor for laptops that it has ever produced.”
“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,”
“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. The company also points out that, when in boost mode, these cores are the world’s first 4GHz-capable Arm cores. The cores on this initial Oryon effort are clustered into three sets of four. All of them are designated as high-performance cores, in contrast to the “hybrid design” (Intel’s term) of Intel’s recent-generation Core desktop and mobile processors, most of which are divided into banks of Performance and Efficient cores (P-cores and E-cores).”
"integrated neural processing unit (NPU), dedicated silicon for processing the large data sets associated with AI workloads. (See: Intel’s “Meteor Lake” laptop chips, coming in December, and AMD’s recent Phoenix mobile processors with Ryzen AI.) The Elite X employs Qualcomm’s own Hexagon NPU, which in earlier times was better classed as a digital signal processor (DSP). In mobile designs, this kind of DSP would often be allocated side jobs like image processing to keep workloads off the hungrier CPU; now, AI and machine-learning workloads are in its purview. The Hexagon silicon is rated for 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) under INT4. In addition, according to the company, the NPU is capable of handling large language models (LLMs) up to 13B parameters. (LLMs with 7B parameters are also supported. With those smaller models, 30-token-per-second processing is possible.) "
“Main memory is now LPDDR5x, supporting 136GB per second of memory bandwidth. Capacities to 64GB will be supported on the platform at the discretion of the OEM. The LPDDR5x is backed by 42MB of total cache.”
“This being a Qualcomm processor, with the company’s pedigree, you’d expect leading-edge connectivity aspects to the platform, and Elite X holds to that. Wi-Fi 7 support is on the menu, as well as, of course, 5G in select SKUs as implemented”
If you wanna court the laptop oem market, windows is the safer bet.
Depending on how in-depth they co-operated with the windows for arm team, keeping some details confidential till launch might have also been easier that way.
They’ve basically been the biggest partner with Microsoft to try and launch an ARM ecosystem for Windows. The oldest ARM laptops were made by them AFAIK
It’s rumored Qualcomm actually has an exclusivity deal for Windows on ARM that’s expiring in 2025. Supposedly, Nvidia and AMD both have chips being prepared for that.
Microsoft is very much trying to push ARM forward, in order to compete with heat, noise, and battery life of Apple laptops and tablets.
Qualcomm didn’t actually choose the name because of it (they choose it because it “sounded fast and fierce”), but now that I know about the flower I’ll think of it instead of snappy dragons whenever I hear the SOC name.
Honest question out of sheer ignorance. Could this, in theory, open doors for an OEM to finally start working on a Linux mobile phone and for devs to spin distros for those phones?
Oh wow, kind of like apple puts an M chip in iPads now, maybe a throttled version of a Snapdragon X chip could be used to make a phone. Didn’t think of that but that would be very cool
This isn’t a phone focused product, and the thermal envelope is quite a bit larger. It’s meant for laptops, and maybe some tablets will see it. These are Oryon cores from their purchase of Nuvia, and I don’t think a whole lot will transfer over.
I don’t know if that would be possible with SoCs. I think if you were able to create a design where the whole SoC was upgraded, that would be more likely to exist.
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