So, the story goes like this. A team of senior Apple CPU designers (who are pretty much behind the M1 architecture) wanted to build server CPUs, but Apple wasn’t interested. So they quit and created their own startup, Nuvia. Qualcomm bought Nuvia so that they can use their designs in PC laptops. In phones, Qualcomm is using CPU cores designed by ARM, which are slower.

It is kind of difficult to get all the details from the Qualcomm presentations, but it seems that the Nuvia Orion core offers similar performance to Apple’s M1/M2, but can be clocked higher (they have a two-core turbo boost up to 4.3Ghz). Their multi-core performance also appears to be very good, but the power consumption goes up. I doubt we will understand better how these chips actually perform before the launch sometime in mid 2024.

If everything goes according to Qualcomm’s plan, you should be able to buy a business/creative type laptop sometimes mid/fall next year. Gaming laptops, probably not for a while. Desktop PC tower — out of the question. Maybe Qualcomm will eventually sell mini-PCs or something like that but those CPUs are not made to be replaceable.

P.S. The funny bit is that the original CPU design team is back to making laptop CPUs and not server CPUs as they wanted. But I can imagine all of them are at least a few million $ richer.

Ok, first of all, you need to chill, the CPU is planned to be released mid 2024, and as such, we obviously cannot answer a lot of your questions.

What we can say is that Qualcomm has been a player in the “windows on ARM” approach. Easily the biggest player there, in fact.

Qualcomm’s goal is to eventually be able to run windows, and as such, “any” windows compatible application. We do not know how fast it will be yet, we do not know enough to do anything more than guesswork.

Both this and previous Qualcomm SOCs are based on ARM work, which in that regard makes them just like the Apple M1 and M2.

So, in short, hold your horses, calm down, and we might start getting answers to your questions around June next year. Also, do take into consideration that a lot of the issues with performance are constrained also by thermal and power limitations.

Oh, and also related to this, given that they have not given us what metrics they will be beating those CPUs, and what I9 in question will be beaten, we can’t even guesstimate things. Are they comparing it to an i9 9900T with 35 watts TDP? Or an 19 13900KS with 150 watts TDP? The performance of these two I9s (obvously) differs by a lot…

One question that we can answer, however, is this:

Will I be able to build a desktop PC with the Oryon CPU?

Most likely not, the approach they have had in the past and that are predicted are that these will mostly be in prebuilt OEM laptops.

Hijacking this thread, sorry OP. I just wonder why all ARM devices need a specific bootloader and a tailored OS imaged to install the OS. Not the case for x86, so I assume it has to do with the CPU extensions and such? Seems like the Cortex cores also support different ops from version to version.

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2023/09/26/whats-going-on-with-qualcomms-oryon-soc/

It has already been leaked that the Oryon is going to be a dumpster fire, all thanks to Qualcomm’s sheer incompetence. So don’t get your hopes up too much. On the bright side things might improve if Qualcomm can learn from their mistakes.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon CPUs which are for Android phones and definitely can’t compete with Apple’s laptop chips,

Apple’s laptop chips use the same architecture their phones do, which are are within the ballpark of the latest Snapdragon chips as it is.

Qualcomm’s laptop chips would compete in the same way Apple’s laptop chips do but for Windows.