Qualcomm Teases Powerful New Snapdragon Laptop CPU, Claims AI Processing Will Redefine PCs
In an x86 system, there are two processing pipelines; the CPU and GPU. When running AI-intensive tasks, the CPU and GPU have high resource consumption, which means high power draw. A Snapdragon chip, on the other hand, has a Hexagon digital signal processor, which excels at AI tasks. Snapdragon chips are designed to intelligently offload tasks to the AI engine to free up resources.
Executives from Microsoft, Adobe, and Citi were on hand at Snapdragon Summit in support of Qualcomm's low power platform with on board dedicated accelerator cores is the way to go. Microsoft pointed to its partnership with Qualcomm on the SQ3 chipset for the new Surface Pro 9 5G, which has a raft of AI-enhanced features, including Windows Studio Voice Focus, Background Blur, Automatic Framing, and Eye Contact Correction.
Most of the current Snapdragon chips rely on CPU cores under Qualcomm's Kryo brand. Earlier Kryo cores were custom architectures, but they have since switched to off-the-shelf ARM Cortex designs. Qualcomm offered a teaser of its next mobile CPU, which it calls Oryon.
This SoC will be the first CPU design to come out of the company's acquisition of Nuvia and could power the company's next-gen Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4. Qualcomm Oryon will also employ a custom CPU architecture based on the Arm instruction set, but it will not be an off-the-shelf Arm core architecture. The company committed to delivering the product in market starting in 2023.