We talked about it for the first time a few months ago Qualcomm Orion, and we will tell you that it could be one of the most important keys of the new Snapdragon 8 Gen4 SoC. Since then, there have been some rumors that have left us small details about its possible configuration at the hardware level, and today it’s time to compile the most important ones and tidy up a bit.

Let’s start from the beginning, what is Qualcomm Oryon? We are talking about an architecture that will replace Qualcomm Kryo, an old acquaintance in the smartphone sector as it has been with us for many years and has undergone various modifications throughout its lifetime. So Oryon will be a new architecture that will bring important improvements over Kryo, albeit eventually your base will still be ARM.

So it’s about a customization layer to be applied based on the ARM architecture corresponding and thanks to it it will be possible to achieve a higher performance peak and possibly even improvements at the level of optimization and efficiency. These were exactly the values ​​of the Kryo architecture and were essential for Qualcomm to dominate the market with its Snapdragons.

We know that Qualcomm could use this new architecture to create a total of three distinctly different designs. On the one hand, we should An SoC with an eight-core CPU, another with a ten-core CPU, and a high-end one with a twelve-core CPU. Those cores will be divided as usual into high-performance blocks and high-performance blocks.

In the case of chips with eight-core CPUs, it seems that they will use the o six high-performance cores and two highly efficient cores. Ten-core CPUs would have six high-performance cores and four high-performance cores, and twelve-core models would be divided into eight high-performance cores and four high-performance cores. In principle, only high-performance cores would be based on the Qualcomm Oryon architecture.

An SoC with octa-core CPUs would be focused on the smartphone sectorand chips with 10-core and 12-core CPUs would be exclusive to tablets, two-in-ones and ultra-low-power laptops. The 10-core CPU version would fit into the Snapdragon 7c lineup, and the 12-core model would be positioned as Snapdragon 8cx Gen4.

There is no doubt that the Qualcomm Oryon architecture does a partial response to Apple’s push with its M2 SoC. It will be interesting to see how they position them, as the foundation of both is ultimately the same, the ARM architecture, and it’s each company’s layers of customization that ultimately make the key differences in performance levels.