Truth to be told, the Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Summit which has just wrapped up earlier today is not just about the new Snapdragon 855 and Snapdragon 8cx processors. The company has also discussed a lot about 5G throughout the 3-day summit although the attention of the topic has toned down today though as the Snapdragon 8cx still pretty much rooted in LTE.
However, that doesn’t mean the Always Connected PC segment is not worthy for 5G in the eyes of Qualcomm though. In fact, it is actually the other way around.
At the end of its Snapdragon 8cx keynote, Qualcomm’s Senior VP for Compute Products, Sanjay Mehta stated that 5G will be coming to ultra-thin laptops in 2019 while holding an unknown model that fits the form factor he mentioned on stage. However, he didn’t make any direct call to the newly revealed Snapdragon 8cx chip.
Then again, it seems that manufacturers shouldn’t face many problems though if they want their Snapdragon 8cx-based devices to be equipped with 5G capability.
During our conversation with Miguel Nunes, the company’s Senior Director for Product Management, we were made to understand that manufacturers have a high level of freedom in terms of how they want to utilize and design their Snapdragon 8cx-based products.
So, to equip 5G connectivity into those products is certainly not an issue for Qualcomm but of course, manufacturers should be aware there are certain challenges that they need to tackle during the design process of their product especially in terms of antennas and other related components.
That being said, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves especially given the fact that Snapdragon 8cx-based products are expected to be available only in Q3 2019 which is still quite a while away.
