Circling ‘Oryon’: A Q&A With Qualcomm Leadership on the Snapdragon X Elite

pcmag.com:

MAUI, Hawaii—At Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit 2023, PCMag sat down with two of the company’s senior leaders for a conversation around the star attraction of the first day’s keynote: Snapdragon X Elite, the first PC-compute iteration of the company’s new Snapdragon X family of mobile processors. Qualcomm has made some bold performance and efficiency claims around X Elite. They stand in stark contrast to the relative paucity of Snapdragon laptop-processor design wins to date (compared with Qualcomm's commanding position in smartphone chips). Many of the initial claims throw down the gauntlet to today’s big-three laptop chip makers (AMD, Apple, and Intel).

Great claims will require extraordinary proof, of course, and the chips are still a ways out (2024). But in the meantime, we had a wide-ranging conversation with Qualcomm's Kedar Kondap, SVP and GM, Compute and Gaming, and Nitin Kumar, senior director of product management. The interview has been slightly edited and shortened for clarity.

PCMAG: Would you mind giving a brief introduction to yourselves?

KONDAP: Hi, I'm Kedar Kondap. I'm senior vice president and general manager for the computer and gaming business at Qualcomm.

KUMAR: I'm Nitin Kumar, senior director of product management, focusing on the compute product portfolio.

PCMAG: So actually the first question's a real simple one. It's just around brand marketing, so that our readers understand what Snapdragon X, Snapdragon X Elite, and Oryon are. I just want to make sure that we've got the terms lined up properly. So “Snapdragon X” is the new platform. “Snapdragon X Elite” is the actual first chip issue in that platform, and then “Oryon” is the CPU component that is part of the chip? We're using the terms