Upcoming AMD-powered Chromebooks will have LTE options

We’re nearing the release of more AMD-powered Chromebooks in Q4 of 2020 with the announcement of a couple of them already in the rear view mirror. HP has their new Pro C645 Chromebook and Lenovo just debuted the ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook Enterprise, both with the new Ryzen C-series processors in-tow. While you can’t get either just yet, we feel confident that even more Chromebooks with these new, powerful AMD chips are on the way, and one such device is coming with better connectivity options.

We mentioned ‘Vilboz’ back in June when we first came across it along with ‘Berknip’. At the time, that put the AMD-powered Chromebook count up to 8 total devices and since then, we’ve pushed that total up to 10 devices we have our eyes on with the newer, more-powerful AMD chips inside. While we are excited by the promise of high-performance AMD chips with great GPUs built-in, we weren’t exactly tracking LTE connectivity for any of these devices. It would seem that ‘Vilboz’ will contain the ability to connect to networks other than local Wi-Fi according to this latest commit:

vilboz: Enable LTE function

Enable LTE_EN(GPIO62) and LTE_W_DISABLE(GPIO40) when power-on. Disable LTE_EN and LTE_W_DISABLE when power-off.

via the Chromium Gerrit

This obviously ins’t the first Chromebook with LTE built in, but it may be the first AMD Ryzen Chromebook to get this treatment. As we’re seeing with Lenovo’s new ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook, these new AMD Chromebooks aren’t messing around and have all the capabilities and features you’d expect from flagship Chromebooks in 2020 like fingerprint scanners, stowable USI pens, Bluetooth 5 and Wi-Fi 6. Having LTE only further expands that list, and we’re very much looking forward to what the rest of these new Chromebooks look like as they begin to show up in the coming months.