Qualcomm Confirms the Launch Timeline of Snapdragon 8 Gen 4

We saw a good number of smartphone releases at the MWC 2024. Most of the flagships that launched at the event this year came with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the latest offering from Qualcomm. Well, at the same time, Qualcomm has announced the launch timeline of the successor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. It will be making its grand entry in October of this year, just like its predecessor.

But that’s not the only good news from Qualcomm at MWC 2024. Don McGuire, Qualcomm’s CMO, has also announced that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will be launching with Oryon CPU cores. With this, we could see a massive performance jump on the successor.

More About Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 and the Oryon Cores

The Oryon cores that will be inside the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 are already ticking inside the Snapdragon X Elite. These cores came into existence after Qualcomm acquired a company named Nuvia. This acquisition happened in January 2021.

In case you are wondering, Nuvia was already working on custom ARM silicon before the acquisition happened. But Qualcomm wanted the custom ARM chips to compete better with Apple, which also happens to be in a good position when it comes to powerful custom chipsets.

But the thing is, Qualcomm doesn’t want to speak about Nuvia anymore. Even though Nuvia engineers became Qualcomm engineers after the acquisition, the Oryon cores of Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 and other chips don’t have any reference to Nuvia.

Nonetheless, with Oryon cores, Qualcomm is using an architectural license. Previously, the chipmaker used to work by licensing the cores from ARM. That’s why you see terms like Cortex in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and previous SoCs of the company.

After Oryon cores, Qualcomm is designing the architecture of the cores by itself. That means the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will not have any Cortex cores in it, just like the Snapdragon X Elite platform.

On that note, this isn’t the first time Qualcomm has designed a custom ARM SoC. Before Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 and X Elite, there was Krait. Qualcomm developed it under an architectural license, and with the Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808, the company switched back to Cortex.

Source(s): GSMArena, XDA