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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably cheaper. Apple is shaving a few cents off which are not passed to the customers.

Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[Kjella]

Yes, it's certainly in some ways better:
Max speed 150 Mbps -> 450 Mbps through more aggregation.
Supported bands from "up to" 20 to "up to" 29.
Reception? No idea.
Power consumption? No idea.
Size? No idea.
Price? No idea, but clearly it's a premium chip.

But I'm guessing Intel really wants to break into this market so they might have given Apple a good price, after all they get to ship in a huge volume. Assuming this is actually true though, I'll call it speculation until it actually launches.

Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[ChunderDownunder]

To rely on a rival SoC vendor for parts undermines Apple's commitment to develop their own chip, as opposed to using an off-the-shelf component such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon, Exynos or Tegra.

Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course it doesn't. Because, you know - the chip doesn't have to filter out noise and stuff that isn't a relevant part of the signal on accompanying bands/harmonics.

Genius indeed.

Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[chowdahhead]

Qualcomm still seems to be at the forefront of cell modem design but the alternatives like Intel are probably becoming good enough at this point. They showed off some stuff at MWC: http://www.anandtech.com/show/...

Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[ArcadeMan]

Tell me about it. The machines doing all the manufacturing aren't even gold-plated.

Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[macs4all]

Probably cheaper. Apple is shaving a few cents off which are not passed to the customers.

"Cost Reduction" in a BOM is NEVER directly passed-on to customers.

Stop with the hate, will ya?

Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[Austerity Empowers]

Or more accurately, the marketing types assess the "price point" of the device they want to sell. The engineers job is to figure out how to maximize the profit (difference between cost of goods, and "price point"). The price point MAY drop, if price wars are a factor and companies think they have a chance to profit enough to run their competitor out of the market, believing their engineers/supply chain have "innovated" more than the other guy.

That's not the apple market though, they are happy being luxury goods and letting the chinese shitshops duke it out on price and destroy each other.

Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[Magnus Pym]

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.

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?

Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[unixisc]

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?

Might it be Intel's fab advantages over Qualcomm? Or anyone else Qualcomm is using?

Re:Intel chip better than Qualcomm?

[tlhIngan]

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.

Actually, Intel probably has plenty of experience making modems - Intel's chips aren't their own designs, they purchased Infineon, one of the big modem chip manufacturers out there - if it wasn't Qualcomm, it's Infineon.

In fact, the first iPhones use Infineon modems. Though, one reason to use Infineon was extreme power management - so much so that it was responsible for killing AT&T's network. Basically the modems immediately killed the data channel when the transfer was over, so if you're websurfing, it would open a bunch of data channels, transfer the content, then shut them down. The end result was an overloaded control channel (opening and closing data channels is a control message). With enough iPhones, this consumed all control channel bandwidth. End result? Dropped calls because a tower with a full control channel mean the phone cannot do a handoff. It's why AT&T, despite having the worst call drop history, had some of the best data transfer rates (because a full control channel doesn't have a relation to how many voice/data channels are available).

As for Intel, maybe Intel is trying to court Apple - with modem chips at first, then maybe with SoC business.

Citation please

[Anonymous Coward]

H1Bs? That would explain a lot. Qualcomm until the early 2000s did incredible stuff. Now they pump out a stream of crap that destroyed voice comm by imprinting over compressing badly designed codecs causing voice to be unintelligible unless the speaker is Asian.

Can you please provide the citation for :

1. Qualcomm chips comes with badly designed codecs which cause voice to be unintelligible

and

2. ... and that the same badly designed codecs are intelligent enough to let not degrading Asians' voices

Thank you for your cooperation !

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.

Re: Citation please

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you explain why POTS lines were cut off over 3.3kHz, then? Decades of use... digital sampling rates are about 8kHz, including guard bands.

Re: Citation please

[Anonymous Coward]

Well 3.3kHz would be analog 3db down. So the roll off would still carry for high energy consonant sounds. ISDN/digital trunks do sound slightly shittier.

Re: Citation please

[Anonymous Coward]

Sampling rates yes. Nevertheless compression codecs until recently dumped the high energy high frequencies because they are data intensive ultimately requiring construction of more cells for more subscribers, or keeping the same cell density, adding more subscribers anyway and making everything sound like shit. Since the compression destroys the voice quality anyway, companies like Samsung and Apple went the extra step and used shit microphones too. Why put in a good mic if what it picks up is dumped by compression anyway?

Motorola tried to keep voice quality up, but that didn't save them.

Re: Citation please

[trparky]

So that's why I always had people tell me that I sounded like I was either under water or in a tunnel when I was on Verizon. I switched to AT&T and everyone said I sounded better on their end, I told them I switched carriers.

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:Integrate the LTE Chip

[AmiMoJo]

Yep, the summary clearly doesn't realize that Intel actually supplies much of the hardware used in other manufacturer's modems already. They provide the baseband processing and Java VM that the modem manufacturer then builds their application (AT command processor etc.) on. What is changing now is that they might supply the baseband hardware directly to phone manufacturers, for even higher levels of integration.

It's an interesting move but the summary doesn't seem to get it.

Re:Integrate the LTE Chip

[edxwelch]

It's possible, but not in any of Intel's Fabs.
The huge price Intel charge for their foundry services eliminates any chance that Apple would ever manufacture their SoCs there.

Re:Integrate the LTE Chip

[edxwelch]

It's also a possiblity that Intel haven't transitioned to their own fabs because of the cost structure. Remember Intel's fabs have always been designed for the manufacture of high margin CPU's, where performance is more important than cost. Low margin mobile products require a different philosophy and TSMC fabs are better suited for low cost manufacture.

Re:Integrate the LTE Chip

[ColdWetDog]

As long as there is no 'Intel Inside' sticker, I don't really care.

Re:Mo-Dem?

[ledow]

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.

Re:Mo-Dem?

[rmdingler]

Modulator-demodulator.

The illudium Q-36?

Where's the kaboom?

Buy INTC

[amightywind]

Intel stock is a screaming buy. P/E of 13, yielding 3%, great growth prospects, and the best chip foundry on the planet.

Re:Mo-Dem?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 4G LTE modems I work with can be configured to interface in multiple ways, and one of the setups is to provide a USB interface with multiple endpoints - one for data and one for AT commands.

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.

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

[thatseattleguy]

That's mine just above - did not mean to be an AC when I posted. (Damn you, Sunday-morning cookie-clearing!!)

/tsg/

Re:Qualcomm?

[Guy Harris]

I thought Qualcomm only made chips for CDMA digital voice. I didn't know that Qualcomm made data chips for 4G LTE as well.

They make chips for CDMA2000 EV-DO, the "DO" indicating that they're most definitely for data, not just voice. Realizing that cdmaONE/CDMA2000 has no future, they're also making W-CDMA/HSPA and LTE chips.

KERN ME

[crywalt]

Is that a M O D E M chip or a M O D E R N chip? KERNING MATTERS

Re:KERN ME

[rubycodez]

Not with Chrome on Windows it doesn't.

Re:KERN ME

[crywalt]

That's actually what I'm using.

Re:KERN ME

[rubycodez]

yup, that one takes an interesting approach to kerning. it doesn't do it.

Qualcomm always had the lead in modem performance.

[edxwelch]

Less power consumption and better reception:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
On top of that they are a node ahead of Intel modems, which still use 28nm.