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Arm Neoverse CSS N4 Launched for Next-Gen CPUs and DPUs
Qualcomm has disclosed key details of its next-generation premium mobile Snapdragon platform ahead of the Snapdragon Summit, revealing the Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU, and Hexagon NPU designed for the agentic AI era. The Oryon CPU features two Prime cores rated at 5 GHz, marking the first mobile CPU to reach that frequency, with FlexCache dynamically allocating cache across heterogeneous cores to reduce system-memory accesses. The Adreno GPU includes three slices clocked at 1.45 GHz, 18 MB of High Performance Memory (HPM) for local graphics storage, and Matrix Cores for dedicated AI processing, delivering a 12% power improvement over the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 baseline. Neural Fusion AI rendering achieves 40% power savings in internal demos. The Hexagon NPU adds a new Element Accelerator for transformer operations, supports context lengths up to 32K with KV-cache acceleration, and increases shared memory by 50% to keep model state near accelerators. For INT4 models, Qualcomm reports up to 50% prefill uplift versus the previous generation, and Mixture of Experts models up to 30 billion total parameters run on the NPU. The Sensing Hub routes voice input to the Oryon CPU, which orchestrates task execution across GPU, NPU, or cloud. The platform emphasizes keeping data and computation close to processing resources to reduce reliance on slower system memory.