Next year, Qualcomm wants to offer Oryon, a specially developed CPU that will first be used in notebooks. WinFuture has now compiled the first features of the new platform. Accordingly, the internally “Hamoa” named chip has 12 cores, uses LPDDR5X and can access fast UFS 4.0.
Qualcomm lifted the veil over the Oryon name just a few weeks ago at the Snapdragon Summit, thereby announcing the designation for future Arm SoCs with their own microarchitecture, which nine years after the Krait 400 CPU in the Snapdragon 800 are back with custom CPUs in the The provider's portfolio, after only slightly adapted arm designs based on the Cortex CPUs were used recently.
Two variants in development
According to WinFuture, the successor to the current Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which is used in the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s (test), among other things, is being developed under the internal code name “Hamoa” and should have the model numbers SC8380X and SC8380XP. The numbers match the previous naming, because the 8cx Gen 3 runs internally as SC8280. The “P” variant could represent a more powerful version compared to the base model.
Efficiency cores return
There had already been rumors that the first SoC based on the Oryon CPU would run with eight performance and four efficiency cores. WinFuture cannot explicitly prove this specific subdivision, but the site wants to have evidence of a structure with a total of 12 CPU cores. The still current Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 runs with four Arm Cortex-X1 with up to 2.995 GHz and four Cortex-A78 with up to 2.4 GHz. Qualcomm therefore completely dispenses with efficiency cores. LPDDR5X as the attached RAM and the support of UFS 4.0 are mentioned as further key data of the new chip. With UFS 4.0, the throughput of the M-PHY interface is doubled compared to UFS 3.0 to 23.2 Gbit/s or 2,900 MB/s per line. Since two lines can be used like in the predecessor, the maximum gross data throughput increases to 46.4 Gbit/s or 5,800 MB/s.
Background to Oryon and Nuvia
Background to Oryon: The name refers to Qualcomm's first custom CPU since Krait, the development of which was followed by the Nuvia takeover. Nuvia was founded in spring 2019 by John Bruno, Manu Gulati and Gerard Williams III. Williams III in particular, as the former Senior Director for Platform Architecture at Apple, is considered a luminary of SoC development. Williams III was responsible for all CPU developments at Apple from 2009 to 2019 and ushered in the 64-bit era of smartphones with the Apple A7. He most recently led the development of the Firestorm design at Apple, which is used as a large CPU core in the A14 Bionic as well as in the M1, M1 Pro and M1 Max. Oryon is scheduled to move into the Snapdragon platforms next year starting with the notebook segment.