Things aren’t entirely bad for Qualcomm. At their conference on Tuesday, AMD’s corporate vice president and GM Kevin Lensing surprised everyone and announced that the two companies are forming a new partnership. Qualcomm and AMD are working together a new line of HP and Asus PCs, and will be powered by Snapdragon 835. The Always Connected PCs are powered by gigabit LTE, meaning they stay connected without having to rely on Wi-Fi.
AMD has had a pretty good year. The company launched the flagship desktop AMD Ryzen ThreadRipper in the summer. They also introduced Ryzen mobile chips with integrated Radeon Vega graphics in October. The new partnership with Qualcomm could potentially be a big step for AMD and bring some good competition to Intel.
Lensing didn’t provide any specifics or additional details on what AMD’s work will be on the new PCs, but Qualcomm’s conference will be all week. There may be some new information in the coming days. For now, AMD has chosen to go with Qualcomm, while Intel has partnered with Apple. This is definitely an interesting route both AMD and Intel are taking to improve their business.