Apple in Advanced Talks to Buy Intel’s Smartphone-Modem Chip Business

Post by tpetry » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:16 AM UTC

jillesvangurp wrote: post #47

Interesting, Apple could do some interesting things with this. The qualcomm situation has resulted in a lot of stagnation in our industry. Companies like Apple are forced to work with them. But given their track record as being aggressive on the IP front (both sides), they have to spend a lot of effort engineering around this stuff. Companies like Intel, Qualcomm, Nokia own a lot of these patents and Apple has been p…

Post by simonh » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:24 AM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #11

simonh wrote: post #9

I think the real risk here is Apple sucking the profitability out of the high end modem business. Qualcomm makes most of their high end modem money out of Apple. The other flagship Android phone makers may not be a big enough market to justify Qualcomm developing the very costly high end modems they need. That could leave Apple as the only manufacturer with the best modems. We’re at least a few years away from that p…

Qualcomm has prevented 20 years worth of upstarts from even attempting to enter the high-end modem business. There isn't a market for high-end modems, there's only Qualcomm. At this point, nuking Qualcomm's profitability seems like the only reasonable thing left to try.

Post by wycy » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:29 AM UTC

tolqen wrote: post #3

bpye wrote: post #2

This worries me. Wouldn't this leave us with Qualcomm once again the only manafacturer of cellular modems for everyone else? I somehow doubt Apple would keep supplying the Intel parts to any other OEMs.

Nobody except Apple bought the Intel parts anyway (possibly because they were absolute flaming garbage relative to Qualcomm’s products), which is why we’re in this position in the first place.

Post by martinald » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:41 AM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #46

tus88 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the challenges in developing modems? Miniaturized, high frequency, low-power, high bandwidth, radio modems to be exact - supporting multiple complex protocols. In real-time. Meaning it is all done in hardware, although firmware does some management stuff. It's about as hard as silicon engineering gets.

Only PHY is in hardware, indeed with firmware control. Then, the protocol stacks on top of that are enormous and complex. The software is very large. Broadcom also tried and failed because they underestimated the task, IMO. Those who can/could make it happen are those who are willing to invest massively over many years and, ideally who have a sure customer. E.g. Huawei who is willing to take the long view and who shi…

Post by wil421 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:48 AM UTC

msravi wrote: post #52

phenylene wrote: post #19

Can someone explain why Intel was having such a hard time competing with Qualcomm? What are the challenges in developing modems?

The hardest part is to get power management right. Anyone can build a modem that "works", but nobody other than Qualcomm, (and I really mean that), has gotten power management right. What I mean is that even today, if you buy a 4G enabled phone not powered by Qualcomm, your battery will drain in a few hours and you'll be left with a dead brick for the rest of the day. Source: I spent years building 3G and 4G PHY chip…