Qualcomm Oryon: what has already been revealed about the competing Apple Silicon processor

The Oryon processor was briefly unveiled by Qualcomm at the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 launch. The company provided a brief description of the component, noting that it was a new custom CPU core capable of reaching a new level of performance.

This short description made us believe that it should still take some time for the Oryon to actually be released, but it’s good to keep an eye on what’s to come, as it has a lot of potential to be a strong competitor to the powerful Apple Silicon.

Oryon should be integrated into future Snapdragon processors designed for PCs, could be an alternative to Apple Silicon processors and an important component to relaunch Windows on Arm devices. Based on these premises, the revelations recently provided by insider Roland Quandt are quite interesting.

The first concrete integration of the Oryon core that is known would be linked to the chip identified with the code name “Hamoa”. The project would have been carried out by a Qualcomm team including former Apple employees and would have resulted in a very powerful ARM chip designed for use in Windows PCs. According to rumors, the chip would include 12 cores, four with low power consumption and eight with high performance (although this last number has not yet been confirmed). The clock frequencies are not known, but the chip’s ability to interact with LPDDR5X memories is confirmed.

The chip is now being tested in two variants, identified by the model numbers SC8380X and SC8380XP. From these codes it can be inferred that these platforms would indeed be the successors of the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (SC8280) presented at the end of 2021.

The test bed also includes the Qualcomm Snapdragon X65 5G modem (released last year). The modem is an integral part of the SoC and is made in 4nm, which leads us to believe that the SC8330/83380X chip can also be made with the same production process. To close the picture, we have confirmation of support for USF 4.0 memories. In summary, a platform that seems to be derived directly from smartphone SoCs, but with enough power to better handle a desktop operating system like Windows 11 – that might at least be the goal for trying to go head-to-head with Apple Silicon.

Unfortunately, not even the new rumors give us an idea of ​​when this new platform should hit the market.

• Codename: Hamoa
• test platform model number: SC8380X and SC8380XP
• manufacturing process: 4nm
• 12 cores: 8 high-performance, 4 low-power
• RAM memories: LPDDR5X
• Storage memories: UFS 4.0
• Modem: Snapdragon X65 5G

So, is Qualcomm really ready to go head-to-head with Apple?