AMD Makes a Surprise Appearance: Ryzen Mobile with Qualcomm LTE
by Ian Cutress on December 5, 2017 4:35 PM EST
One of the surprises at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit was the presence of AMD. Out of no-where, Kevin Lensing, CVP and GM of the Client Business Unit at AMD, was invited onto the stage to announce that AMD and Qualcomm were in a connectivity partnership.
Recently AMD announced it was bringing its new high-performance x86 CPU cores and its latest GPU architecture to the notebook space. Within a 15W form factor, the Ryzen 7 2700U packs in four Zen cores along with 10 Vega compute units, to which AMD states that they have the top performing 15W notebook processor on the market. At the launch, three designs were briefly announced from HP, Acer, and Lenovo, from which the HP Envy x360 with the Ryzen 5 2500U is currently available for sale (we’re awaiting our review sample).
What Kevin Lensing was doing on stage at a Qualcomm event was announcing that AMD and Qualcomm have been working together on bringing LTE connectivity to the Ryzen Mobile platform. Normally when a vendor creates a notebook or a smartphone platform, they create a series of reference designs which are sent out to OEMs. These designs are meant to demonstrate how the parts fit together, and what sort of technologies can be implemented (just in case the OEMs don’t realize what can be possible). Kevin explained that in those Ryzen Mobile reference platforms, they included a Qualcomm LTE modem to allow for mobile connectivity on the go.
Equipping a laptop with mobile connectivity is not necessarily new – Intel has been doing it for years with their own modems (such as the XMM7260 and XMM7360), mostly in business end devices or Chromebooks. The fact that AMD is getting in on the action (and even appearing at a Qualcomm event to talk about Ryzen and Ryzen mobile) makes it interesting for sure. Kevin Lensing on stage stated that several OEMs were sufficiently interested in enabling their designs with Qualcomm LTE connectivity. As a result, some of the more interesting Ryzen Mobile designs, either for business or for casual users, might actually have LTE enablement as an option.
The obvious questions are about the extra cost, carrier partnerships (if they’re from OEMs, QC, or from AMD), and then also a nod at what the extra power consumption is. Questions I suspect that might be discussed next month at CES, when everyone involved will be giving new information about the products coming to market.
Related Reading
- Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Summit: Day One Live Blog
- Microsoft Launches Windows 10 On ARM: Always Connected PCs
- The Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 Performance Preview
- Microsoft and Qualcomm Collaborate to Bring Windows 10 & x86 Emulation to Snapdragon Processors
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lilmoe - Tuesday, December 5, 2017 - link
BahahahahahahaJust when Windows on ARM devices started to show up.
Love you too, AMD.
ddriver - Wednesday, December 6, 2017 - link
Snapdragon performance will be abysmal for anything remotely demanding. Pretty much pointless since non-demanding tasks are already covered by android apps. What android lacks is the demanding prosumer stuff. Which is useless on ultra low power cpus, even more so if running emulated. Making the entire ordeal kinda pointless... but so is a great portion of what the industry is doing anyway.jvl - Wednesday, December 6, 2017 - link
God you're a troll. The whole point of this post is to have Ryzen as the heavy-lifter.Seriously, why are you even here? No one values your postings (my firm belief), no one believes anything you blurp out anyway... Damn why do I feed you?
Samus - Wednesday, December 6, 2017 - link
I share your beliefs jvl. We all do.ddriver - Wednesday, December 6, 2017 - link
You should totally join up and start a religion around them beliefs ;) The church of idiocracy, with me as the incarnation of evil.negusp - Wednesday, December 6, 2017 - link
He's referring to Snapdragon on Windows. Which was launching under the "always connected" moniker.I'll reiterate- why buy a $700 ARM Windows crapbook when ~$4-500 Chromebooks are fully capable of running x86 (sans DirectX) via CrossOver or crouton/Linux? Not to mention full Android app support.
niva - Wednesday, December 6, 2017 - link
Because it's running full windows 10, until we actually get our hands on it we don't know how well it's going to run. I'm fairly sure, that in terms of raw throughput, the SD835 isn't any worse than my old Phenom CPU that I ran windows 10 on until last year when my mobo died.Chromebooks are useless, crouton sucks, if I have to jump through hoops just to install linux on it it's not worth buying.
Full windows 10 on a phone, that I can just plop down into a docking station, sounds very appealing, especially for businesses.
negusp - Wednesday, December 6, 2017 - link
The SD835 will be leagues slower than your Phenom running x86 software, guaranteed.As for Chromebooks, you're talking out of your ass. Crouton works beautifully. If you can't get Crouton running even as an average user you really don't deserve to be using modern computers. Besides, you completely ignored the fact that Chromebooks have access to the entire Android app ecosystem.
I fully agree with your last point, except for the fact that Microsoft tried and failed to do that with the Elite X2.
nobitakun - Tuesday, December 12, 2017 - link
Amen for that negusp. The most stupid thing ever is seeing Qualcomm trying to run Windows 10. Not even SD845 or SD1000 will be able to run x86 code smoothly. This retarded way of doing things is really astonishing...loa - Friday, December 8, 2017 - link
I definitely value ddrivers postings.Perhaps he is a troll, by some definition of troll.
But then he is vastly more informed than most other trolls.
Trolls usually just spew out something like "this is so really bad! Intel/AMD/Nvidia/ Qualcomm just go fuck yourselves!"
ddriver is actually varied, has different kind of arguments and he can write clearly.
Yes, sometimes he is way off with his analyses. But even then he is quite entertaining.
The anandtech forums would be much poorer without ddriver.