What’s the big deal about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite using Oryon CPUs? (Updated)

Note: This article was first published on 22 October 2024 and was updated on 24 October 2024 with the news of Arm moving to terminate Qualcomm's chip design license. It is now updated again to reflect Qualcomm's win against Arm (story here).

You’ve probably heard about Qualcomm’s biggest announcement of the year: the launch of Snapdragon 8 Elite, its 2025 mobile platforms for flagship Android smartphones.

A huge part of the announcement was Qualcomm’s replacement of its purchased Kyro CPUs with in-house Oryon CPUs, where the company finally let its eight-year-old Kyro design go and got some well-deserved rest.

But what’s not as well known is Qualcomm's struggles with using Oryon CPU in the first place, even as they implanted it into its PC processing platform, Snapdragon X Elite, last year. 

This limitation wasn’t an issue with technology (or the lack thereof), and yes, even an industry as dry as chipmaking and chip design has tea to spill. Strap in.

Even CPUs can be a Netflix special

Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU component has an entire backstory that could be made into a Netflix special. At a superficial level, the Oryon CPU is said to be the generation taking over Qualcomm’s Kyro CPU, with incredible leaps in performance and efficiency.

However, to design and manufacture Oryon CPUs, Qualcomm had to find the right crew to pull it off. Namely, it acquired Nuvia for a cool US$1.4 billion in 2021 for that purpose, and it did not come easy. 

Nuvia’s bread and butter was creating customised, high-end, Arm-compatible CPU cores, and it had only been around for a few years before it Qualcomm snatched it up (it was founded in 2019). The company was allegedly highly sought after, with other brands like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Intel wanting to acquire Nuvia before Qualcomm’s eventual acquisition.

Why does such a young startup attract so much interest? That’s because of the people who founded Nuvia. It included several titans of chipmaking and chip design: two of them (1, 2) helped (or led) the development of Google’s smartphone/mobile processor (which is now known as Tensor).

The other founder was Gerard Williams III, who was said to be behind Apple’s M1 chipset. He worked for nearly a decade in Apple’s crucibles as its senior director of platform architecture. 

With that combo, it was almost a given that whatever Nuvia was planning to cook up (originally, server CPUs) could create considerable changes to the CPU advancements of today. It's bolstered by the fact that the team that worked at Nuvia went on to develop Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU.

Almost as soon as Nuvia was established, Apple promptly sued the company. The latter claimed there was a breach of intellectual property and that the founder shouldn’t have planned to start a 'rival firm' while still on Apple’s payroll. Apple lawyers eventually dropped the lawsuit in 2023.

That’s not the end of it. In 2022, Arm sued its customer, Qualcomm, aiming to undo its acquisition and the chip designs made with Nuvia by claiming it had breached license agreements and infringed on trademarks. This is despite Qualcomm still paying royalties to Arm each time it uses Arm’s technologies, which includes the licence needed to make Oryon CPUs (more below).

As of June this year, the lawsuit hasn’t ended, and it's said to be interfering with the development of AI-powered devices for the whole industry, notably Copilot+ on Microsoft laptops (which, as some know, uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chipsets).

Interestingly, not long after publishing this story, Arm has issued a 60-day notice to terminate Qualcomm's architectural design license. If the lawsuit went through, Qualcomm will no longer be able develop Arm chip designs, and, more worryingly, might even be forced to stop selling Arm-based chips altogether. Fortunately for Qualcomm, this lawsuit resulted in a mistrial, so the chip designer can continue with its Oryon CPU products for the time being.

Is Oryon CPU really that noteworthy?

For slightly technical details on Oryon CPU inside Snapdrgon 8 Elite, refer to our announcement coverage here.

For Qualcomm, it was a matter of switching from OEM to in-house design. As kindly explained by XDA Developers, the previous Qualcomm Kyro CPUs used Cortex-branded cores from Arm. These Cortex cores are sold to chip designers like Qualcomm and MediaTek, which is why you see them specifying the Cortex core and clock rates with each launch (as customers, Qualcomm and MediaTek can specify which cores they want to buy and how fast they should be).

Qualcomm Oryon CPUs were designed in-house and didn’t use Arm’s cores. However, Qualcomm still pays Arm for the license to use Arm’s instruction set, which is crucial for programming and software to understand the architecture. 

For phone users, the Snapdragon 8 Elite (and its included CPU) is relatively new to smartphones, but the Oryon CPU has been inside Qualcomm’s PC processing platform, Snapdragon X Elite, for a while now (it was launched last year), albeit the PC ones had the first-generation version.

We’ve since experienced a few of these Qualcomm-powered Windows laptops, as seen in our Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x review, and many others are coming along inside our testing labs.

If you want a good summary of how different it feels to use an Oryon-backed Qualcomm chipset, we have a short video that captures our experiences. It includes usage from professionals and other real-world scenarios.

While we won’t say that the experience above directly translates to the same type of performance in the mobile-centric Snapdragon 8 Elite, we'll get a better idea once we start on 2025’s flagship phone reviews. As they are, we will likely see a significant generational difference in Snapdragon mobile platforms, thanks to the changes in CPU choice.

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.