Qualcomm is hard at work on Oryonla, the next iteration of the Snapdragon for Windows On ARM PCs. Two SoCs are expected: the Snapdragon 8cx Gen4 with 12 cores, and a more modest version with 8 cores, whose code name is still unknown. These versions are all the more expected as they will be the first SoCs resulting from the takeover of the startup Nuvia.
Kuba Wojciechowski, author of the first leaks, gives new details letting imagine the design of this SoC. Thus, the 8 P-cores would be clocked around 3.4 GHz, while the 4 E-cores would turn around 2.5 GHz. This SoC will be able to support a maximum of 64 GB of LPDDR5x RAM at 4200 MHz compatible with options to reduce consumption.
The integrated graphics part, the Adreno 740 comes from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC for smartphones. It is compatible with DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3, OpenCL and DirectML (Microsoft’s learning API). The Snapdrogon 8cx Gen4 and its 12 cores will also support dedicated GPUs thanks to 8 PCIe 4.0 lanes. Four other PCIe 4.0 lanes will allow communication with NVMe SSDs, while other PCIe 3.0 lanes will be dedicated to the wifi 7 chip and the modem (probably a Qualcomm X65).
State-of-the-art connectivity
The connection will not be outdone since there will be two 10 Gb / s USB 3.1 ports and three Thunderbolt 4 ports with DisplayPort 1.4a support. This SoC will support up to three screens in 5K and 4K and will be able to decode 4K at 120 Hz and encode 4K at 60 Hz with support for the AV1 format.
It remains to be seen when Qualcomm will announce the Oryon processors. The MWC 2023 show to be held at the end of February seems a bit early for an announcement, as these processors will be engraved by TSMC during this third quarter. The Qualcomm high mass, the Snapdragon Summit which is usually held in November in Hawaii, seems ideal for such an announcement, which would correspond to the availability of the first ARM PCs equipped with these SoCs in early 2024.