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.

Comments

Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am posting this question because I am not a hardware engineer. Apple's switching from Qualcomm chip to one from Intel ... does that mean Intel's chip is better?

If the answer is yes, then in what way Intel's chip is better?

Does it have better reception? Does it run faster? Does it use less power?

Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[default luser]

Exactly, people din't care about peak LTE speeds going over some insane 300 MBps level. As long as they can get a few MBps to load a webpage as fast as their moble processor (and limited ram) can handle it, they don't care about super-high speeds.

This is why Mediatek became a thing with nothing but 3G parts in China, and it's the same reason why Mediatek's (and Intel, and Samsung) early 4G entry to the market rings the death knell for Qualcomm.

That's why they have introduced the Snapdragon 410 - 4 Cortex A53 processors, a passable GPU with 720p support, and 150Mbps LTE! All selling at a bargain price competitive with all the other entry-level parts.

LTE is not a premium feature anymore, so unless Qualcomm comes up with some other must-have technology, they're going to have to transform their business to work better with commodity margins, or else do like everyone else and start making their own phones?

Integrate the LTE Chip

[ProfessionalCookie]

I would hope this is a step toward Apple integrating the LTE chip into an Intel produced Apple A9 or A10. Intel clearly has the best process for performance per watt and Apple clearly wants to integrate as many things as possible into the package.

Re:Integrate the LTE Chip

[Anonymous Coward]

Before that can happen Intel needs to start manufacturing their modems using thier factories. Due to the celluar modem IP being acquired, it was originally designed to be built by TSMC factories and Intel hasn't converted it over yet. It seems that changing process tech for that modem must be a non trivial amount of work since with SOFIA they prioritized moving the baseband processor away from ARM to Atom but they are still fabbing SOFIA at TSMC.

I believe these discrete high end Intel modems are still ARM though I expect now that they have the baseband running on x86 that this 7360 series will be the last family of ARM based modems from Intel. It seems likely given the direction set by SOFIA that converting to x86 is first priority and converting to Intel factories is next after that.

Re: Citation please

[Anonymous Coward]

You can lop off highs above 3000Hz and Chinese, Korean and Japanese languages are still perfectly understandable. Vietnamese a little less so. The European languages become so garbled without highs over 3000Hz (really need about 5500Hz) to distinguish between B T C D E sounds. Cell phones made with Qualcomm tech pushed to about 4700Hz until 2002. Then, inexplicably they lopped off all frequencies above 3300 until the iPhone 4s came out, which pushed up to 4200Hz... So SIRI would work at least some of the time.

If all the Qualcomm engineers being hired were from eastern Asia I could see how they thought loping off the top of the frequency spectrum didn't affect intelligibility. When Qualcomm did that, by for years later everyone quit talking to each other... At least European descent people's... And started texting. It was the only reliable way to convey info. Voice became cumbersome, annoying, and imprecise.

Re: Citation please

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy. Right on the money. I have an old oscilloscope and can confirm.

So much Fail in the story and the summary....

[Anonymous Coward]

Urmmmm....one wonders if samzenpus has been hoodwinked by Intel's PR minions. Among other things:

1) The quoted IT World article references a single source, a posting in online mag VentureBeat - not generally a well-known news provider when it comes to internal chipset-sourcing decisions (as would be EE Times or the like). And while, that original VB article claims two sources for its information, it doesn't identify either. So classify this from the start as "interesting rumor, might be partially true" at best and "planted story" at the worst.

2) Regardless of the veracity of said rumor, you have to get down to the fourth paragraph of TFA before you see:

  "The one caveat is that the 7360 chip will be used in a special version of the iPhone that will be sold in emerging markets in Asia and Latin America."

So...not replacing all Qualcomm modem chips in all iPhones (as the summary implies). Not even replacing existing ones. Just a new slot in a new, low-cost phone for emerging markets. Exactly where you'd want a chip that might not perform as well, but for which the manufacturer is bleeding money in their mobile biz and is desperate to give you a ridiculously low price to win the slot for the positive PR and Apple-approval-halo-effect it would give.

Finally....even if the summary was true as written and Qualcomm lost the modem slot everywhere, that still would leave it with 5-6 other chips in every iPhone at present. I'm pretty sure after referencing the teardown videos, they're the largest single vendor in terms of the revenue of any supplier of iPhone parts - and that's before the patent royalties on LTE they get from Foxconn.