Qualcomm is building 5G into chipsets and PCs

BARCELONA—Qualcomm is taking the next step into 5G, promising 5G-enabled Windows laptops and to integrate 5G into next year’s Snapdragon smartphone platform. Both Qualcomm’s 8cx 5G chipset for PCs and its unnamed future integrated phone chipset will rely on its new X55 modem, which supports all of the current globally planned 5G networks.

The new mobile phone platform (let’s call it the Snapdragon 865, although it may be a new product line for 5G) will be ready for commercial devices in early 2020, and Samsung will use the new platform in future products—probably the Galaxy S11.

“We look forward to introducing a device on this platform in the near future,” Dr. June Hee Lee, head of Samsung’s technology strategy team said.

The 8cx, meanwhile, will be used in unnamed future PCs by Lenovo, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said. Qualcomm later told me these PCs will be coming “this year.”

This is a very fast transition. The earlier X50 modem, which is in the first round of 5G phones including the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and the LG V50, doesn’t support China’s standalone 5G networks or the low-band FDD rollouts planned by AT&T and T-Mobile. Those phones are coming out this spring. This fall, we’ll have X55-based phones that will work on all the networks. Now we know that we’ll see phones with an integrated 5G chipset in early 2020.

The big difference between using an add-on 5G modem and an integrated chipset should be battery life. To aid the battery life of the first-gen 5G phones, Amon said they have a new “Power Save technology” that “will allow a 5G user to have all-day battery life on their smartphones.”

Amon didn’t get too much into the details of the power-saving mode, which he says involves “discontinuous reception.” But it sounds a lot like a feature folks were talking about last week, to potentially disable millimeter-wave antennas that are blocked by hands and body parts. By only using antennas that are free, a phone can run its radio at much lower power, saving battery life.

The power-saving feature is in both the Samsung Galaxy S10 and LG V50, Qualcomm confirmed.

“5G is here. It’s here in 2019. This is the year of launch,” Amon said. There are now more than 20 mobile phone makers planning 5G devices, he said, with 30 devices coming.

“It’s almost a 10x difference on the device side than what we saw with 4G,” he added.

This article originally published at PCMag
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