CES was taking over Las Vegas this week. We want to provide our readers with a brief summary of things catching our attentions.

AMD

• AMD finally announced Zen 2 based 7nm laptop APU on CES. This is the product we have been waiting for since they first launched a 7nm desktop CPU 6 months ago.

• The laptop contributes 2/3 of the total PC shipment globally. While AMD’s Zen+ based 12nm products have been taking shares gradually over the past few quarters, the pace is somewhat slower than the share gain they saw in the desktop and server market. And they haven’t been able to surpass Intel on single-thread performance and power efficiency.

• The new 7nm Ryzen 4000 series did not disappoint us. AMD claims the Ryzen 7 4800U outperforms Intel’s latest 10nm i7-1065G7 in all metrics. 4% better on single-thread performance, 28% better on graphics, and a whopping 90% better on multi-thread performance thanks to the doubling of core count.

• We have little doubt the new product will accelerate AMD’s market share gain in the laptop market over the next few quarters.

• In addition, AMD also announced Threadripper 3990 for the HEDT market and Radeon RX 5600 for graphics. Overall AMD provided a very strong product portfolio during the 45-minute presentation. In contrast, Intel’s presentation was very content light with only a very brief demo of their next-generation Tiger Lake core and DG1 Xe discrete graphic card and provided no detail.

QCOM

• QCOM’s presentation is unsurprisingly filled with the word 5G. Interestingly, the company barely spent any time talking about the smartphone but dedicated most of the presentation to PC and cars.

• On 5G rollout, QCOM is expecting 1 billion 5G connections by 2023, 2 years faster than 4G to get the same level of penetration. The latest Chinese smartphone data shows that in December 2019, 19% of the smartphone shipped in China is already 5G enabled.

• The company announced the first 5G PC in partnership with Lenovo. The Lenovo Yoga 5G PC is another laptop running Snapdragon 8cx, the same processor powering the Surface Pro X announced couple weeks ago but equipped with an X55 5G modem supporting both sub-6 and mmWave. We have not seen this kind of competition and innovation in the laptop processor market for a long time, it is a great time to be a consumer and investor.

• On automotive, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon Ride platform (more on this later) in addition to sharing some details on their auto business. It has secured the most infotainment design wins in 2020, and the total design win pipeline for the auto business reached $7 billion. However, the revenue will not materialize in the very near term given that auto business has a very long design cycle. For example, Land Rover came on stage showing their collaboration with Qualcomm based on the Snapdragon 820 that was first announced almost 5 years ago.

• Overall our take is that Qualcomm is increasingly expanding outside of their traditional smartphone business, and leveraging their strong 5G capability into other verticals to make everything connected.