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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

#221

Post by donatzsky »

blunte wrote: post #108

I find great irony in Qualcomm exercising a monopoly position to take a % of total phone price from Apple... since Apple uses its monopoly position to take a % of all app revenue. What Apple thinks would be fair for Qualcomm chip license fees would also be reasonable for App Store fees.

Apple only takes payment for apps sold through their own platform. Only if, on the other hand, they also demanded a cut of revenue from sales on competing platforms, you could talk about a situation similar to Qualcomm.

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

#222

Post by makapuf »

School-Cotton wrote: post #192
makapuf wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure. If that were the case why wouldn't intel expose a native, better fit to uops instruction set in addition to the legacy, difficult to decode one and let the apps use the newer ones (or the subset of existing ones which do map well)?

My guess is (1) inertia, and (2) not wanting to commit to a specific instruction set because they tweak the internal μop set with every release. And (3), this would add complexity, because, even though one is much simpler, now you need two completely separate decoding pipelines and mechanisms for switching between them.

Can't argue with 1. For 2 it's still an instruction set separate from uops so you might not be as sensitive to changes you still get a level of indirection. For 3 .. it depends. You might gain in power if you use the newer one more and you might as well make the older one simpler to achieve 90% of speed maybe. But maybe the decoding of instructions that counts is not that expensive compared to OOO branch predictors and 512 bits ALUs

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

#223

Post by tooltalk »

jMyles wrote: post #212

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.

> The monopolistic position of qualcomm has not only driven up prices,

What is your evidence of such claim?

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

#224

Post by ksec »

hajile wrote: post #164
vkaku wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Intel should just spin out it's 5G modem team and let a neutral (!Apple) vendor develop it. Samsung should start selling 5G modems in NA as well. I know this stuff isn't going to work in the short term, but this is the sort of choices we need.

Semiaccurate has a rather interesting take here. TL;DR is that modems are very hard to make. Intel's modems were much slower and used much more power for last generation. They ran into issues and don't seem to even have a shippable 5g chip. https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/04/16/qualcomm-just-beat-a... https://www.semiaccurate.com/2019/04/18/why-did-intel-kill-o...

Semiaccurate also said Intel's 10nm is dead. And Nokia was going bankrupt.

So please, please, stop bringing up SemiAccurate on HN.

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

#225

Post by tooltalk »

planetsmashr wrote: post #140

I recently worked with a technical VP at a chip foundry in South Korea. One day Quallcom came up in discussion and he said "Qualcomm are like gangsters in the industry".

I know this is completely tangential, but just wondering if Apple ever came up in discussion.

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

#226

Post by ksec »

jMyles wrote: post #212

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.

>The monopolistic position of qualcomm has not only driven up prices

There has been no evidence as such. Even in court.

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

#227

Post by yaantc »

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?

Here's the landing point I use: https://www.3gpp.org/specifications/specification-numbering

In particular, serie 36 is for the LTE RAN (radio access network) while series 38 is for the NR (~5G) RAN. But other series are relevant, for the core and services parts among (many) other things.

All the specs are publicly accessible, and also the change requests (CR) submitted for discussion at the standardization meetings, as well as the minutes. From a spec page you can get to its history and the related CRs. Now of course, there are side discussions but the process is still very open in practice. But it's really huge, don't really expect to make sense of it with a little casual looking around. It takes some real time investment and commitment.

Another point to keep in mind: the cellular industry has one of the most demanding certification process for consumer grade devices. And operators often add on top of this. You don't want buggy devices messing up a shared medium, particularly when it's a scarce resource in many places (high density urban area at peak time). If designing a cellular modem is hard, making it go successfully through certification and also work well in the field and pass the tiers 1 operators field trials (drive tests in particularly harsh locations) and interoperability tests is even harder.

A lot of people miss this part. It takes millions in test equipment just to get ready to enter certification, and that's not the main cost. Even if it's painful, it's also important to make sure things work reasonably well in such complex, multi-parties systems. Which is why certification is legally required to operate in many places (e.g.: Europe requires GCF certification). There are open implementation of LTE, but none certified and legally usable in the field because of this.

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

#228

Post by fluffything »

gumby wrote: post #167

Part of this comes from the willingness of EE standards bodies to standardize on stuff that is covered by patents. I was going to say "part of the blame" but it was Qualcomm's choice to take advantage of this. Rambus is another bad guy in this regard.

This +1. Imagine if ECMA script or the ISO C++ standard were covered by patents.

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

#229

Post by bsder »

newnewpdro wrote: post #211
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.

You might want to go check a dictionary.

"abysmal" can mean very great or limitless DOWNWARD (a la "abyssal")--but that's a secondary definition.

However, the primary definition appears to be: "immeasurably low or wretched : extremely poor or bad"--which is the sense in which I used the word.

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

#230

Post by brokenmachine »

newnewpdro wrote: post #211
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.

abysmal

adjective

    1.    extremely bad; appalling.
    "the quality of her work is abysmal"
    synonyms: very bad, dreadful, awful, terrible, frightful, atrocious, disgraceful, deplorable, shameful, woeful, hopeless, lamentable, laughable, substandard, poor, inadequate, inferior, unsatisfactory
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