At its recent Investor Day, Qualcomm talked about the third generation of its "Oryon" CPU cores, completely disregarding the second-generation Oryon cores for its AI PC project. The company projects these processors will debut in 2025, targeting devices priced as low as $600 to broaden its market presence. Qualcomm hopes to capture 30-50% of the serviceable addressable market (SAM) for non-x86 AI notebooks by 2029, a significant extension from its earlier, more ambitious 2027 target. Qualcomm's Oryon 3 CPUs will succeed the Snapdragon X Plus chips and are expected to deliver substantial performance and efficiency improvements. While no performance hints were dropped for the third-gen, the second-gen Oryon cores receive about a 30% boost in processing power and 57% greater efficiency compared to the first-generation Oryon chips. This indirectly indicates that Oryon 3 will record an even higher performance jump.

However, the Oryon 2 generation will skip the PC segment, appearing instead in Snapdragon 8 Elite smartphones. Despite these advancements, the road to higher market share is fraught with challenges. Qualcomm faces competition from potential entrants like MediaTek and NVIDIA, both expected to join the non-x86 notebook market by 2025. Furthermore, the company's revenue projections for the PC segment—$4 billion annually by 2029—pale compared to Intel's $29 billion in PC chip sales in 2023, highlighting the scale of competition in this space. Qualcomm's strategy also includes diversifying its revenue streams beyond PCs. By 2029, it targets $8 billion in automotive chip sales, $4 billion in industrial applications, and $2 billion from VR products. With competition in the Arm-based AI PCs heating up, companies must increase performance dramatically to get a head start.

According to Bloomberg, Arm Holding PLC, the holding company behind the Arm instruction set and Arm chip designs, just issued a 60-day notice period of license retirement to Qualcomm, its long-time partner. The UK-based ISA provider has notified Qualcomm that it will cancel the Arm ISA architectural license agreement after the contract-mandated 60-day notice. The issues between the two arose in 2022, just a year after Qualcomm acquired Nuvia and its IP. Arm filed a lawsuit claiming that the reason was "Qualcomm attempted to transfer Nuvia licenses without Arm's consent, which is a standard restriction under Arm's license agreements." To transfer Nuvia core licensing, Qualcomm would need to ask Arm first and create a new licensing deal.

The licensing reworking came just in time when Qualcomm experienced its biggest expansion. The new Snapdragon 8 Elite is being used in the mobile sector, the Snapdragon X Elite/Plus is being used in Copilot+ PCs, and the automotive sector is also getting the new Snapdragon Cockpit/Ride Elite chipsets. Most of that is centered around Nuvia Oryon core IP, a high-performance, low-power design. Arm's representatives declined to comment on this move for Bloomberg, while a Qualcomm spokesman noted that the British company was trying to "strong-arm a longtime partner."

At Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform, the most powerful and world's fastest mobile system-on-a-chip ever. Our flagship mobile platforms are now taking on the Elite name, showcasing the remarkable progress it represents for the industry. This platform debuts industry leading technologies such as the second generation custom-built Qualcomm Oryon CPU, Qualcomm Adreno GPU and enhanced Qualcomm Hexagon NPU, all of which deliver game changing performance improvements.

These innovations empower the Snapdragon 8 Elite to transform user experiences with their devices - making on-device multi-modal generative AI applications a reality on smartphones powered by Snapdragon. These technologies also fuel many other experiences across camera capabilities, with our most powerful AI-ISP, as well as next level gaming, super-fast web browsing and more.