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

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: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?