AMD has announced that it will be working with Qualcomm to create ultrathin laptops with LTE connectivity. According the first information, the upcoming Ryzen mobile processors will sport Qualcomm Snapdragon X16 LTE modem. This is a great news both for AMD and Qualcomm, they are aiming to push the "Always Connected PC" as a necessity for the future.

As you might know, a few days ago AMD announced its new high-performance x86 CPU cores and its latest GPU architecture available for notebooks. The Ryzen 7 2700U packs four Zen cores and Vega compute units with a total TDP of 15W. At the moment AMD might offer the top performing 15W notebook processor on the market. At the launch, three designs were announced from HP, Acer, and Lenovo. During the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit, Kevin Lensing (CVP and GM of the Client Business Unit at AMD) was invited on stage to announce that AMD and Qualcomm were in a connectivity partnership.

Putting a LTE modem inside a laptop isn't something new, Intel has been doing it for years with their own LTE modems. For example you can find LTE modems on Intel high-end or business latops from Dell, Toshiba, ASUS and many others. However this is something new for AMD and the fact that the company is getting in on the action makes it interesting for sure. AMD didn't announce any specific products, but they have infused Qualcomm's Snapdragon 4G LTE modem into their Ryzen Mobile reference test platform. AMD has worked closely with Qualcomm lately, in order to create a solid product.

The obvious questions are about the extra cost, carrier prices and the final power consumption. Since the CES 2018 is pretty close, we expect to find more information around next month.



Source: AMD