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Apple's Internal Hardware Team Is Working On Modems That Will Likely Replace Intel (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple will design its own modems in-house, according to sources that spoke with Reuters. In doing so, the company may hope to leave behind Intel modems in its mobile devices, which Apple has used since a recent falling out with Qualcomm. According to the sources, the team working on modem design now reports to Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies. Srouji joined Apple back in 2004 and led development of Apple's first in-house system-on-a-chip, the A4. He has overseen Apple silicon ever since, including the recent A12 and A12X in the new iPhone and iPad Pro models.
Before this move, Apple's modem work ultimately fell under Dan Riccio, who ran engineering for iPhones, iPads, and Macs. As Reuters noted, that division was heavily focused on managing the supply chain and working with externally made components. The fact that the team is moving into the group focused on developing in-house components is a strong signal that Apple will not be looking outside its own walls for modems in the future. In recent years, Apple has been locked in a costly and complex series of legal battles with Qualcomm, the industry's foremost maker of mobile wireless chips. While Apple previously used Qualcomm's chips in its phones, the legal struggles led the tech giant to turn instead to Intel in recent iPhones.
Before this move, Apple's modem work ultimately fell under Dan Riccio, who ran engineering for iPhones, iPads, and Macs. As Reuters noted, that division was heavily focused on managing the supply chain and working with externally made components. The fact that the team is moving into the group focused on developing in-house components is a strong signal that Apple will not be looking outside its own walls for modems in the future. In recent years, Apple has been locked in a costly and complex series of legal battles with Qualcomm, the industry's foremost maker of mobile wireless chips. While Apple previously used Qualcomm's chips in its phones, the legal struggles led the tech giant to turn instead to Intel in recent iPhones.
I suspect a large part of this success is not due to technical superiority, but getting priority at newer (lower power) fabs due to Apple's large volume of orders. Their Ax processors were the first to use the smaller lithography available from fabs, which meant a corresponding reduction in power consumption for the same level of performance (or alternatively, better performance at the same power consumption). Back when they still used Samsung as a fab, even Samsung Semiconductor prioritized Apple's order ahead of Samsung Mobile's own Exynos SoCs.
If you remember the whole mess over the Nvidia Maxwell GPUs (the 8xx and 9xx series) not performing as expected, it's for the same reason. Nvidia assumed they'd be able to use TSMC's new 16nm and Samsung's new 14nm processes to manufacture Maxwell, and designed Maxwell assuming the thermal limits of those lithographies. But Apple's order for Ax processors bumped them down in the queue. That forced Nvidia to manufacture Maxwell on 28nm, leading it to overheat until they redesigned it with fewer cores, meaning it under-performed. It was so bad they actually re-used the Kepler architecture (700x series) for their higher-end mobile 8xx GPUs, since it was already optimized for the thermals of 28nm. Pascal (10xx series) was manufactured on 14nm and 16nm as expected, and was a success.
Sorry, no. Their cores are fully custom and designed from scratch. They haven't licensed other people's technology and bolted them together since the A5 over seven years ago.
The idea that first access to fabs is the only reason their ARM cores beat everyone else's is laughable, considering that Huawei's core was out on the same process as the A12 within a month or two but only half as fast. In fact, Apple's two year old A10 is pretty comparable to the Huawei's latest, and Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 855 (which also uses the same process as the A12)
There's an entire universe of difference between "fully custom and designed from scratch" and licensing the entire architecture from ARM.
Apple needs a license to build anything using the ARM aarch64 instruction set. The implementation is pure Apple.