Qualcomm's Oryon CPUs: Almost Entirely Custom, Minimal Arm Tech

Qualcomm's Oryon CPU cores, powering the Snapdragon X processors, are based on the Armv8 instruction set architecture (ISA), but according to Gerard Williams III, a lead developer, they utilize "one percent or less" of Arm's original technology. This suggests the cores are almost entirely custom-built. Nuvia and the Origins of Oryon Qualcomm's Oryon cores originated from Nuvia, a company co-founded by Gerard Williams III in 2019. Nuvia originally aimed to design high-performance, energy-efficient CPU cores (codenamed Phoenix) for datacenters. The company acquired both a Technology License Agreement (TLA) and an Architecture License Agreement (ALA) from Arm. While the TLA permitted the reworking of existing cores, Nuvia's primary objective was always custom core development. The Nuvia team designed their microarchitecture from scratch, minimizing their reliance on Arm's proprietary circuit blocks and other IP beyond the instruction set architecture itself. …