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Intel Will Reportedly Land Apple As a Modem Chip Customer
itwbennett writes After so many years of spinning its wheels, Intel is reportedly about to make a big step into mobile by providing Apple with LTE modem chips for its hot-selling iPhone. The news comes courtesy of VentureBeat, which cites two separate sources of the plans. The story says Apple will begin using Intel's new 7360 LTE modem processor in place of a Qualcomm chip, which has been there for a few generations.
Modulator-demodulator. It doesn't have any particular meaning and is the more generic word.
Your Ethernet port is a modem.
Your wireless card is a modem.
Technically, things like TV cards are modems.
A modem does not equate to something that only talks over a telephone landline.
But then, even so, the last few generations of GPRS, 3G chips actually speak an AT Hayes *MODEM* command set in order to ring, send text messages, dial-up to the Internet etc. I can't speak for 4G but I'd be shocked if your 4G dongle doesn't actually just present itself as a very fast modem.
This. The modem performance of the latest Qualcomm chips are pretty close to channel capacity and at least 3dB better than the best from either Intel's or MediaTeks according to reports I've seen. That means roughtly that the modem part of the phone spends double the energy to attain the same speeds, and under power-limited conditions would provide far less throughput.
It is pretty difficult to get perfect performance out of a cell modem, the underlying theory is pretty complex, and translating these complex algorithms into a practical working implementation is incredibly difficult. Neither Intel nor Mediatek know how to close the gap. Qualcomm is probably the only company in the world that has the knowhow and brainpower to do this.
But here is the thing: there was a time before the advent of the iPhone when consumers actually cared about the quality of the modem or underlying wireless technology. They don't any more. Or at least, not enough to vote with their wallets and do anything that the phone-makers care about. No-one who likes the iPhone will ever switch away to Samsung or similar because the cell modem is better... especially since they are on Wifi more than 50% of the time.
This is why Mediatek has become a unbelievable success in Asia and now biting into Qualcomm's profit at the high end. This is also why Intel (after struggling to make a viable cell modem for years and years) is finally getting a shot at the big time. And this spells really bad news for Qualcomm... another case of the market picking a demonstrably inferior product.