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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

#241

Post by em500 »

wmf wrote: post #35
pier25 wrote: post #34

So why did Apple decide to make its own SOCs but not its own modem chips? I would expect making CPUs and GPUs to be a lot more difficult than modems, no?

CPU design and RF stuff are both very difficult; I wouldn't assume one way or the other. I wonder if knowledge of CPU design is more widely dispersed (e.g. you can hire ex-Intel, ex-AMD, ex-IBM people) than cellular radios where the only (working) ones seem to be made by Qualcomm.

Samsung, Huawei and Intel all make working 4G modems. They work fine outside the US, which suggests that there is some US-specific problem at work.

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

#242

Post by sonnyblarney »

"Qualcomm's first weapon against competitors: patent licensing terms requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips."

Wow, shocking.

I'm surprised Jobs didn't gather a forum of all the handset makers to work as a cabal against QQcom on the issue.

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

#243

Post by sonnyblarney »

protomyth wrote: post #52
macspoofing wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they really 'strangle the company'? Blackberry had a meteroic rise and they collapsed because of iPhone and (later) Android.

After reading about it particularly "Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry", I think guardiangod is correct, but also Verizon and, to a much lesser extent, the whole stock dating scandal. If Verizon hadn't been so gun-ho for an iPhone killer, Blackberry would probably of got to something like the Passport a whole lot faster. They needed to stay in their l…

I worked at RIM during the rise/collapse and would indicate the issues were mostly structural, cultural, and competitive.

BlackBerry was a small company up against the #1 product of the era (iPhone) and a 'free' competitor. Both companies are basically #1 and #2 brands in the world. They have very deep experience in all things, channels, money etc..

We had no 'mapping team' really, Google had 100 people.

iOS is from MacOS. BB had this ancient thing.

We were just a tiny company that got clobbered, but frankly, BB was culturally more like 'motorola' than an advanced, well run entity. BB could not compete.

RIM started in 1982, not in the 1990's. The 'rise' was quite meteoric when they decided to put email on your hip, and added a phone.

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

#244

Post by sonnyblarney »

protomyth wrote: post #69
guardiangod wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't get into details, but basically I agree with you. The Storm...was a product of many compromises. But it's only the start of a series of decisions that...

I dearly wish someone would explain the whole idea of why Blackberry built the Playbook. It seems like a product that was so forced with such a confusing development story.

To give BB credit, the playbook was a '1st gen' device for that category, it's really only when compared to Apple, an amazing company with so much to leverage, that the Playbook was bad.

If they could have taken more time, it might have been better.

But the Playbook product did effectively expose the lack of depth, talent and relevant experience at RIM. I'm ashamed to say.

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

#245

Post by xorcist »

derefr wrote: post #38
wmf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPU design and RF stuff are both very difficult; I wouldn't assume one way or the other. I wonder if knowledge of CPU design is more widely dispersed (e.g. you can hire ex-Intel, ex-AMD, ex-IBM people) than cellular radios where the only (working) ones seem to be made by Qualcomm.

> 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?

They can, and they did. Not exactly of course, the two products are fundamentally different, but the organization owns enough IP and good engineers to make a viable product. From a technology standpoint it seems reasonable.

The problem is that the competition is tough and you need to stay on your toes with much more rapid iteration than on the "other leg" where you sell expensive stuff to telcos. And the margins on the consumer side are smaller. So, historically, it has proven very difficult to host the same two "legs" in the same organization. The one with bigger more reliable business tends to push the other out. It's been the same with much of the computer industry too.

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

#246

Post by ksec »

jMyles wrote: post #234
ksec wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The monopolistic position of qualcomm has not only driven up prices There has been no evidence as such. Even in court.

Fine, I added a "perhaps" - my real point was about spying, not prices.

And it is not a single point of failure either. Huawei, Samsung, Mediatek, all have their own modem, as well as Spreatrum ( It has a new name I can't even remember ) , and Xiaomi and Soon, Apple.

I know a lot of people hate Qualcomm, but reading the 230 pages of the report I cant help but felt sorry for them.

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

#247

Post by lotsofpulp »

ubercow13 wrote: post #206
bitcurious wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, consider a video call on the iPhone XS with v.s. a $50 phone with a low resolution screen. The value of a high bandwidth internet connection is higher when the screen allows you to perceive the difference.

That doesn't seem like a reasonable way to price things. It's like Apple charging companies a percentage of all revenue made using their Macbooks

Reasonable way to price things when neither the seller nor buyer are under duress is to for them to an agreement. It doesn’t matter if it’s % of revenue or flat, if they both came to an agreement, then it’s reasonable.

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

#248

Post by acdha »

Const-me wrote: post #218
acdha wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Note that I wasn’t arguing that Intel had switched from one textbook architecture to another: only that it isn’t really an accurate way to discuss modern chips after decades of large teams of smart people have been borrowing each other’s ideas.

As to your specific example, ARM has instructions which do complex operations as well. Does that mean it’s not a RISC CPU, or just that some engineers made a pragmatic decision to support things which are done heavily like AES or SHA?

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

#249

Post by ksec »

wtallis wrote: post #239
ksec wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Semiaccurate also said Intel's 10nm is dead. And Nokia was going bankrupt. So please, please, stop bringing up SemiAccurate on HN.

Intel's 10nm was a failure. Cannonlake was a mostly broken chip. It's taken them a year and a half from shipping Cannonlake to starting to ship Ice Lake. The 10nm process Ice Lake is fabbed with is not the same process Cannonlake was fabbed with; Intel has disclosed a few of the changes that were made in order to produce a viable chip, but we won't know the full extent of the changes until TechInsights gets their han…

Icelake was never meant for the 10nm used in Cannonlake, it was a 10nm+ part. 2nd the shrink is there, at least according to what just announced ( or picture shown ) in Computex by counting how many die on Wafers. 3rd They are shipping it, we don't know yield but we know they are shipping it at least in decent quantities.

And 4th, 10nm is not dead, Intel is not skipping it for 7nm. Nokia is not dead either. And it doesn't matter how anyone spin it, SemiAccruate is like tabloid of Tech Report, and to ensure the quality of news I personally believe it should serve no role on HN.

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

#250

Post by acdha »

School-Cotton wrote: post #153
acdha wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All the moving pieces in Intel x86-to-RISC decoding (instruction decoder, μop cache, Microcode Sequencer ROM...) use up a non-trivial amount of silicon and power.

Yes, it’s more than zero but you have to look at that as part of the entire chip budget. For example, this USENIX paper estimates 3-10% on power:

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/cooldc16/cool...

That’s not nothing but usually when people talk about this the rhetoric assume it’s much greater and that e.g. ARM doesn’t have similar issues supporting its older instructions, albeit at smaller scale. If you look at the results, and a couple decades where everyone else was struggling to match X86 on either performance or non-embedded power efficiency, it clearly wasn’t holding them back that much. Even Intel’s huge moon-shot clean architecture failed to outperform despite starting with considerable experience and no legacy baggage.

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