AMD, Qualcomm partner to make Gigabit LTE powered Ryzen Mobile PCs

In a surprise appearance at the Snapdragon Tech Summit, AMD announced it’s joining forces with Qualcomm to introduce “Always Connected” 4G LTE Ryzen Mobile products.

Always-Connected Ryzen Mobile Products Coming in collaboration with Qualcomm

Yesterday was a busy day for Qualcomm. The company unveiled their new flagship Snapdragon 845 processor that will power high-end smartphones. It also showed off its Snapdragon 835 hardware designed for always-connected Windows 10 PCs. If all that were not enough, Qualcomm partnered with AMD to bring the always-connected functionality to the Ryzen Mobility platform.

“Both AMD and Qualcomm have shown a consistent commitment to delivering products that redefine next-generation mobile user experiences,” said Kevin Lensing, corporate vice president and general manager, client computing, AMD. “OEMs around the world will now be able to combine the recently announced AMD Ryzen mobile processors with Qualcomm Technologies’ leading wireless solutions via their Snapdragon LTE modem family to achieve new levels of performance, connectivity and capability for ultrathin notebook PCs.”

We already know that Ryzen-powered laptops are scheduled to hit the market next year, but Qualcomm’s involvement will turn AMD’s mobility platform into an always-connected one. AMD did not mention any specific products, but you can expect the Snapdragon LTE modems being integrated into the new line of Ryzen-powered netbooks or 2-in-1 devices.

This would effectively allow Ryzen Mobile to acheive Gigabit LTE speeds, while being able to benefit from Qualcomm’s low-energy connectivity technology. There will be a caveat to this, however: users will likely need to extend their data service to their mobile computing device.

AMD’s Ryzen mobile processors combine the company’s latest “Zen” x86 cores and Radeon Vega graphics on a single chip to provide unprecedented ultrathin notebook performance. If the official numbers are to be believed, the Ryzen 7 2700U can beats Intel’s 91W Core i5-7600K Kaby Lake desktop chip. That is incredibly impressive.

So pairing the always-connected functionality with AMD’s compute power will further strengthen team red’s position in the apparent war against Intel’s monopoly in the mobile sector.