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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.
Probably cheaper. Apple is shaving a few cents off which are not passed to the customers.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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And occasionally whores for Karma.