So I keep seeing these articles and videos about how Qualcomm made a CPU that can beat Apple’s M2 Max and even Intel’s i9 series. I wasn’t aware that Qualcomm was a player in the desktop CPU space. Does that mean we’ll soon be able to buy gaming laptops powered by Oryon CPUs? Will I be able to build a desktop PC with the Oryon CPU? I’ve only ever used Qualcomm’s Snapdragon CPUs which are for Android phones and definitely can’t compete with Apple’s laptop chips, so I’m not sure how their desktop lineup works.
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.