Intel Breaks Qualcomm's Hold On Apple's Baseband Chips (wsj.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader randomErr writes: In a big blow to Qualcomm, Apple plans to incorporate Intel baseband chips into at least some models of the new iPhone 7. The selection of Intel chip means that in newer iPhones Apple will no longer support CDMA technology popularized by Qualcomm. The Wall Street Journal states that many industry analysts believe Intel could be supplying as many as half of of baseband chips for Apple's handsets.
This was the last key iPhone component that didn't have two sources, and the Journal estimates that Intel's revenues could now increase by up to $700 million before the end of 2016.

Comments

The iPhone 7/7+ still support CDMA

[JoeyRox]

They have to - Verizon and Spring still need to finish deploying more GSM/LTE spectrum before they can finally abandon CDMA. Until then Apple still has to buy chips from Qualcomm for phones sold into Verizon/Sprint customers. The difference for the 7/7+ is that Apple has a GSM/LTE-only SKU that uses the Intel chips, for AT&T and T-Mobile (and global) customers.

Re:The iPhone 7/7+ still support CDMA

[Anonymous Coward]

UMTS (the 3G GSM standard) uses a CDMA-based modulation scheme, yes, but that is totally unrelated to what is discussed in this article. What the new Intel chips do not support is the IS-95 standard and derivatives, which also uses a CDMA-based scheme, but is otherwise unrelated, and which is misleadingly referred to just as "CDMA". UMTS is supported just fine by either modem.

Verizon, Sprint, etc. use IS-95 and successors (CDMA2000, EV-DO, etc.) for 2G and 3G service. The GP is correct that Verizon and Sprint would need a complete LTE rollout to turn that off and use only the standards that form part of the GSM family tree (GSM, UMTS, LTE).

Re:The iPhone 7/7+ still support CDMA

[Lord Apathy]

Both GSM and CDMA are on the way out. The way phone makers and carriers are going is called Voice over LTE. Which basically means that in the future voice will be encoded and carried over the data LTE lines instead of a separate voice only system.

The theory is this will make phones simpler, free up radio spectrum for other uses, and improve call quality. And it will. I have tested some voice over LTE hand sets and the call quality is much better than over GSM and CDMA.

Re:Yeah. Well,

[0100010001010011]

You can't have the government dictate stuff like that. Look at how few phones Europe has. The mandated GSM standard killed innovation and phones barely took off.

In 'Murica it makes sense to not only have competing standards but to have them on different frequencies. (Can't have T-mobile talking to a AT&T tower). This sort of competition has let companies pick the best and most profitable route for roll out. As a result we have the cheapest, fastest most ubiquitous cell phone setup anywhere in the world.

Capitalism wins again over dirty socialism and government intervention.

CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA standards war

[Solandri]

GSM was based on TDMA - everyone gets an equal timeslice of the bandwidth, even if they don't actually use it. In CDMA, everyone gets an orthogonal code and broadcasts whenever they want to. Broadcasts by other phones raise the noise floor for your phone. SNR then scales depending on how many people are transmitting at any given time, and all the bandwidth gets distributed automatically and equally between only those transmitting at that time.

TDMA was fine for voice. But when it came to high-speed data, GMS simply couldn't compete with CDMA's superior bandwidth allocation. They threw in the towel after a year - most implementations of 3G on GSM used wideband CDMA. They just named it UMTS, HSPA+, etc. because of sour grapes. This is why you could talk and use data at the same time on GSM phones - they had a TDMA radio for voice (still do), and a CDMA radio for data. CDMA phones used the same radio for voice and data (which were built on different protocols since voice was about a decade older) so couldn't do both simultaneously.

Most LTE implementations are OFDMA - does the same thing as CDMA, except using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. OFDMA requires more processing power to separate out the individual broadcasts, which is why it came after CDMA. Early OFDMA implementations like WiMax sucked up too much power with processors of the time, and would drain a cell phone battery in about 2-3 hours. It wasn't until a few years ago that low-power processors allowed us to implement OFDMA while not requiring a recharge halfway through the day. But CDMA was pretty much the proof of concept needed to make OFDMA a reality. Before CDMA, nobody knew if a real-life cellular network with hundreds of devices broadcasting simultaneously using orthogonal signaling would actually work or scale like theory said it would.

If the people saying the U.S. should've adoopted GSM had gotten their wish, our cellular data speeds today would probably be down below 1 Mbps. When a competitor introduces a far-superior product, it forces the other players in the market to improve, instead of sitting on their asses not improving things because people are paying them anyway. Now that LTE is becoming ubiquitous, loss of CDMA would be less of an issue. But any phone built without CDMA will not be able to fall back to 3G data in most areas of the world.

Re:CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA standards war

[swb]

If the people saying the U.S. should've adopted GSM had gotten their wish, our cellular data speeds today would probably be down below 1 Mbps. When a competitor introduces a far-superior product, it forces the other players in the market to improve, instead of sitting on their asses not improving things because people are paying them anyway.

The contra to this argument is that differing standards forced carrier lock-in, keeping consumers stuck with a device that wouldn't work on other carrier networks, allowing them to it on their asses and not improving things because people couldn't easily leave the carriers they were on.

Had the US adopted a carrier-neutral standard users could have easily switched carriers without buying a new device and device portability and consumer choice would have driven carrier improvements instead of consumers being forced to sit around and wait for a carrier to adopt improvements to their unique signalling.

Re:CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA standards war

[slimjim8094]

I hardly know where to begin. You're confusing standards with modulation techniques. You're also confusing GSM the standard (1991, TDMA, voice with GPRS and then EDGE) with GSM the "class" (which includes UMTS, HS(D)PA(+), and LTE). The latter is a set of standards defined by the 3GPP, whose scope now includes the maintenance of the original GSM standards.

CDMA is a modulation technique (actually a "channel access method", basically a way to share the medium vs an actual encoding). Other modulation techniques are AM, FM, QAM, CODFM, and OFDMA (OFDMA is one channel-access version of OFDM - 802.11G uses OFDM with CSMA/CA instead). There's a "class" of standards built on IS-95 (you may remember it as cdmaOne) that includes CDMA2000, 1xRTT, and EV-DO. These did pioneer the use of CDMA for cellphones, but everything uses CDMA nowadays, and GSM (the lineage) has used CDMA (W-CDMA) since UMTS.

The point is, in non-RF cellphone usage, the antonym to CDMA is not TDMA, but GSM. And GSM the lineage has very much won the standards war with LTE. Over 90% of devices in the world use GSM-lineage standards, including most Verizon and Sprint devices (which are right at home on LTE). Eventually the legacy IS-95 derived standards will be completely turned off and the US will have gotten over its weird not-world-standard fetish, at least for cellphones.

Re:Why avoid again?

[Khyber]

"People who believe that theory are dumber than a bag of hammers."

Do you not know that Apple is the largest BlueTooth headphone maker on the planet? Hello, Beats.

If you can't smell the money grab, you need to have your brain checked for tumors.