- At MWC 2024, Qualcomm's CMO confirmed that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will launch with Oryon CPU cores in October.
- It is also said that the flagship SD 8 Gen 4 chipset will be fabricated on TSMC's 2nd-generation 3nm process node.
- Qualcomm may also improve the NPU on Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 for better on-device AI performance.
At the MWC 2024 event, Qualcomm announced that its next-gen mobile chipset, Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is coming in October. But the interesting part is that Qualcomm’s Chief Marketing Officer, Don McGuire, confirmed that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will feature custom Oryon CPU cores.
Qualcomm has been using its Kryo CPU cores for the last many years, and finally, we will see a new CPU design on Snapdragon mobile chipsets this year.
The American chipmaker already announced Snapdragon X Elite in October last year — an ARM-based desktop chipset for PCs — which packs the Oryon CPU cores. And now the same Oryon CPU is coming to mobile chipsets as well. Check out the video confirmation below.
In case you are unfamiliar with the Oryon architecture, it is designed by the former chief architect of Apple Silicon, Gerard Williams III, who left the company and founded Nuvia in 2019. Qualcomm later acquired Nuvia in 2021, and the same team has developed the Oryon CPU, which is said to be plenty powerful and efficient, outperforming even Apple’s latest M-series chips, as seen in the latest Snapdragon X Elite benchmark leak.
According to the rumors, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will feature an octa-core setup in the form of a (2+6) cluster, packing two high-performance cores and six high-efficiency cores.
Qualcomm seems to be doing away with little cores entirely. Apart from that, for the first time, the chip maker will likely raise the maximum frequency to 4.0GHz on its smartphone chipset, much higher than Snapdragon 8 Gen 3‘s 3.3GHz clock speed seen on the Cortex-X4 core.
Qualcomm is also said to be moving to TSMC’s 2nd-generation 3nm process node (likely N3E) for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset. Overall, with the inclusion of Oryon CPU cores in SD 8 Gen4, Android flagships stand to compete against Apple’s A-series chipset on iPhones.
Apple is already lagging in the GPU department, compared to Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU and Samsung’s Xclipse GPU developed on the AMD RDNA 3 architecture. Now, Qualcomm may be ready to dethrone Apple in the CPU department as well.
