As part of Qualcomm’s latest Investor Day, the company confirmed that its next PC chip, the Snapdragon X Elite Gen 2, will use the Oryon v3 CPU. This comes as a surprise to many, as the Oryon v2 was just announced last month alongside plans to use it with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset for smartphones.
Since the current Snapdragon X Elite chip uses an Oryon v1 CPU, many assumed that the 2nd-gen chip would use the 2nd-gen CPU — but it seems the PC chips will be skipping over this generation entirely.
So far, we know that the Oryon v2 is 30% faster and 57% more power efficient than the first generation and that the v3 will outdo the v2. Since the third generation is still in development and won’t get a proper release announcement until the next Snapdragon Summit almost a year from now, the details are pretty much nonexistent.
For now, Qualcomm is just promising improvements to get audiences and investors hyped. To truly impress people, however, Qualcomm will have to deliver results that match current-gen Apple silicon — and we have no idea yet as to whether that will happen.
Power efficiency is one of the major strengths of the Apple silicon chips, and the main reason battery life is so good on Macs. The latest M4 chips feature “efficiency cores” that can complete the same task as a “performance core” while using 93% less energy.
If that number seems impressive, it’s because it is — so it will be no easy task for Qualcomm to match it. Competition is what keeps an industry healthy and exciting, however, so even the Apple fans out there should be rooting for Qualcomm is this case.
