Oryon: Qualcomm with a new name for high-end chips?

Qualcomm is currently preparing to introduce its next high-end chip for smartphones, which will be the first to use the new “Oryon” CPU with its custom cores in this form factor. Now there are indications that a new naming system is also being introduced. yabhishekhd / X/Twitter

Instead of Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 comes the ‘Snapdragon 8 Elite’

It will still be a few weeks before Qualcomm invites you to the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii again. As every year, they want to present the most important innovations related to their own chips for smartphones, tablets and now also Windows PCs.

Traditionally, the latest top SoC for the coming model year of the upper-class smartphones with Android has always been presented there in recent years. This will probably be the case this year too – but with one important detail. With the latest generation of its top SoCs, Qualcomm wants to offer the new custom cores called “Phoenix” in a CPU for smartphones for the first time.

These highly customized ARM cores are also what enable the new ARM PCs with Windows 11 to achieve previously unattainable performance, thanks to which they are able to keep up with Intel and, above all, Apple in terms of notebook performance.

Nuvia custom cores end up in smartphones

This is made possible by the work of the team of former Apple chip designers taken over from the startup Nuvia, who also provided the basis for the notebook chips called Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus.

With the new high-end chip known internally as “SM8750”, which also has the code name “Pakala”, there will soon also be a smartphone version equipped with two top and six “normal” cores as well as a 5G-capable modem. So that the customer notices this, Qualcomm apparently wants to adjust the name of the new top SoC accordingly.

Like on one to see a real-looking picture which apparently comes from the Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi, the upcoming high-end chip will not be called Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 as expected. Instead, there will probably be talk of the “Snapdragon 8 Elite,” with which Qualcomm is adapting the branding to the concept used in the Snapdragon X Elite.

Xiaomi apparently wants to use the chip in its high-end smartphones of the Xiaomi 15 series, which are expected to be launched in China this year as part of the market launch of the “Snapdragon 8 Elite”. Xiaomi names October 23, 2024 as the date for a corresponding announcement – the day on which the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2024 begins.

It remains to be seen to what extent Qualcomm will also use a model number in the new naming scheme, as we find it in the various variants of the Snapdragon X series. Benchmarks have already indicated in the last few weeks that we can expect a massive increase in performance, which will also be due to a maximum clock speed of the high-end cores well beyond the 4 gigahertz mark.