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How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

arstechnica.com

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Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#211

Post by newnewpdro »

bsder wrote: post #46

Is Qualcomm a ruthless monopolist? Yep. But what people forget is that EVERYBODY was knifing one another in that space when CDMA originally came out. The only difference is that Qualcomm is the ruthless monopolist that won. In addition, while I have no love lost for Qualcomm, what you do have to remember is that CDMA was a "bet the farm" moment. If CDMA could be delivered, it was significantly better than what existe…

> and the yield was abysmal.

Nit: abysmal means very great/limitless... I suspect you meant dismal here.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#212

Post by jMyles »

The monopolistic position of qualcomm has ~~not only~~ perhaps driven up prices, but of even greater concern, has created a single point of failure for phone security.

I have concerns that, even as full device encryption has evolved and many of us have moved communication to more secure media (Signal, Riot, etc), the very baseband chip of the phone is still acting like a bug in our homes.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#213

Post by Const-me »

mschuster91 wrote: post #44
derefr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cellular radios where the only (working) ones seem to be made by Qualcomm. Seems strange, given that plenty of manufacturers are making the radios on the other side of the cellular connection. Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio?

> Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio? Workable maybe but not power efficient, which is crucial in mobile. That takes years to figure out and is the reason why ARM is so utterly dominant on mobile - there simply is not any Intel x86 offering even close to the power envelope of ARM, even after years of ARM…

> there simply is not any Intel x86 offering even close to the power envelope of ARM

They are very close. Intel has many x86 chips consuming 3-4W: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_M_microproc... Some older Atoms were under 1W.

> the reason why ARM is so utterly dominant on mobile

The economy. When you sell complex chips for $10, you have to sell a lot of them to return R&D costs. That's why they shut down cheap Atoms introducing Core M series: technically the two are close in many respects, but Atoms were sold for $10-20, core M's for $200-300.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#215

Post by Const-me »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #117
mschuster91 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't, say, Ericsson take the radios in their cell towers or picocells, redo their tape-outs for phone scale, and end up with a workable mobile radio? Workable maybe but not power efficient, which is crucial in mobile. That takes years to figure out and is the reason why ARM is so utterly dominant on mobile - there simply is not any Intel x86 offering even close to the power envelope of ARM, even after years of ARM…

Intel could probably do it if they had the luxury of redesigning their instruction set. They're stuck with supporting an overly CISC-based instruction set whose roots date back to the early 1970s. ARM didn't have that problem and designed a much more modern RISC-like instruction set which requires a lot less power.

Intel CISC with 0.65W TDP: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/35472/i...

Sun RISC of the same era, 84W TDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#216

Post by dwaite »

tracker1 wrote: post #89
awad wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Chrome on iOS.

Chrome on iOS still uses Safari's renderer and JS engine.

My understanding is that Google is allowed to use their own renderer and their own Javascript engine - as long as it doesn't do JIT compilation. The ability to mark pages or files as executable is a platform security model thing.

Chrome uses WebKit because Google would rather use a WebKit/JSC engine than a slow Blink/V8 engine - especially since Blink is a WebKit fork.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#217

Post by ksec »

mbreese wrote: post #91
aey wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Qualcomm strangled RIM with their 3.4% (peak!) licensing fee on the selling price of the phone. If RIMs profit margin was 3.5% they had bigger problems. Here is the thing. If Apple sold a 2G network based iPhone with a non Qualcomm IP modem, and a 4G iPhone at 2x the price with a Qualcomm modem, which one would make more money for Apple?

Why should the price of the phone matter to Qualcomm? Did they have anything to do with the CPU, screen, memory or battery?

It doesn't and it also doesn't matter. There are lots of license agreement, in tech or not that takes a percentage of your selling price.

And if it wasn't a percentage, it will be a fixed price for everyone, while it may sound fair, all of a sudden everyone selling a phone would be paying in total ~$50 to Patents license. That might not matter to higher end phones, for the lower spectrum that is a huge increase in Total Cost.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#218

Post by Const-me »

acdha wrote: post #126
dreamcompiler wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel could probably do it if they had the luxury of redesigning their instruction set. They're stuck with supporting an overly CISC-based instruction set whose roots date back to the early 1970s. ARM didn't have that problem and designed a much more modern RISC-like instruction set which requires a lot less power.

This argument has held progressively less weight since 1995, when Intel released the Pentium Pro and started the precedent of deciding x86 CISC instructions into the micro-ops which are actually executed. ARM is a respectable architecture and Apple has shipped some very competitive chips but it’s not like Intel’s engineers have been in a coma for forty years.

Micro-ops aren't RISC. Instructions like VFMADD132PS perform a dozen of math operations, combined with RAM access, yet decode into a single micro-op.

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#219

Post by School-Cotton »

mschuster91 wrote: post #210
School-Cotton wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple phones do not use ARM-designed processors. They just implement the same instruction set. If it’s possible for Apple to develop a mobile processor independently of ARM, why shouldn’t it be possible for Intel?

> If it’s possible for Apple to develop a mobile processor independently of ARM, why shouldn’t it be possible for Intel? Apple holds an ARM architecture license ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Architectural... ) and to this day the Apple CPUs are ARM ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A12X ).

Read my comment again. You are restating exactly what I said.

Apple designs processors that implement the arm64 instruction set. They do NOT use processors designed by ARM (the company).

Re: How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years

#220

Post by ferdek »

farahday wrote: post #201
Uptrenda wrote: post #194

The strangle hold is extremely bad for security, too. All of those Qualcomm chips are designed as black boxes. Nobody knows what kind of horrible flaws are inside them because trying to get at the code is like trying to rob the federal reserve. We need open source 3/4/5G chips, but the R & D cost would be astronomical. If you ever think that TCP/IP is complicated check out the mobile system specs some time! They span…

Where can one take a look at those specs? Are there RFC like things available?

There you go! https://www.3gpp.org/

At the beginning of my corporate career I was working on implementing LTE layer1 (PHY) in internal testing tool. It sometimes took us weeks to understand a single page from the specification - those were fun times ;)

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