Qualcomm announces a new generation of customized PC processor core Oryon, calibrating Apple M-series processors

CTOnews.com November 17 news, today at the Snapdragon Technology Summit 2022, Qualcomm announced the name of its new generation of custom Arm core: Oryon. The cores will be used in chips designed to counter Apple's M-series custom Arm processors, but the company didn't provide details.

Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in Santa Clara for $1.4 billion in January 2021. NUVIA's founder is a former Apple chief architect who has worked on CPU designs from the A7 to the A14, and Nuvia is working on custom Arm architectures that Qualcomm needs to compete with Apple, especially in laptop computing.

CTOnews.com understands that Qualcomm's CPU cores are currently based on Arm-based public architecture, such as Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 has four Cortex-X1 cores and four Cortex-A78 cores, and the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 has a powerful Cortex-X3 core.

Custom chips enable Qualcomm to own the entire stack and no longer rely on Arm to launch its designs. That means it can operate not just like Apple, but like Intel and AMD.

The new chip based on Qualcomm's Oryon is scheduled to be available to OEMs in samples in the second half of this year and will be commercially available in 2024.