Apple-Designed 5G Modem to Be Separate From A-Series Chip, Again Rumored to Debut in 2023 iPhones

[deconstruct60]

Why would countries have issues with Apple using their own modems?

Not issues as much as "proprietary standards". At a 100,000 foot level the 4G , 5G standards are uniform. If get down into the 'weeds' of standards implemented and deployed per country get down into varying frequencies and encoding standards.

Apple switched from Infineon to Qualcomm modems in part because Qualcomm was first to have "world ready" modems that worked "everywhere". ( some firmware options that is adaptive to all the variations. ). That problem has only grown more diverse and varied

So primary case in point China has a frequency/time encoding that countries that don't buy Chinese base station equipment can't do. They use their "we are a billion people market" to get folks to go through gyrations to deploy to their country ( plus they now have greater leverage on the products in market. Need to certify equipment in country. So have to bring it in and test. )

Furthermore, each country has their own certification/verification standard. Which means have to bring in equipment and pass muster with the government and how many telecom players are in the company. That can mean multiple bureaucracies to navigate ( and in some countries multiple layers of bribes and graft to pay). There is lots of 'scut work' to getting certifications in hundreds of systems. In part, it just takes time. Part of the substantive upside of buying Qualcomm modems is that they have already done much of the tedious work of getting certifications and approvals. They have the service and base station provider relationships. Ther is a mountain of i's to dot and t's to cross.

For Apple there are probably diminishing returns for some countries. To much "drama" and not enough sales to put the modems on the "fast track" certifications.

 

[jdb8167]

they have no fabs tho. Over reliance on TSMC will be their downfall in the future

If TSMC fails for some reason, it won't just be Apple that feels the pain. AMD also uses TSMC for all their modern CPUs. Even Intel has now contracted with TSMC for some of their future products. There are only 3 modern fabs in the world right now: Intel, TSMC, and Samsung. If TSMC has a serious issue, the whole world is going to feel the pain.

 

[deconstruct60]

Apple co-founded ARM ltd. in 1990.

Apple also sold off their holdings in ARM in the late 1990's

A rather obtuse point to rolling out a new modem and RF chips.

 

[JPack]

Actually I'm surprised if their modem isn't integrated (assuming the rumor is true). Qualcomm achieves significant power savings by the integration in their Snapdragon SoCs. Perhaps Apple just isn't there yet.

There aren't significant power savings from integrating a modem. Unlike other logic sections (e.g. GPU), the modem doesn't require a big bandwidth interconnect between it and the main logic. This in means the power savings aren't big.

Qualcomm integrates their modem as part of their business strategy to lock in smartphone manufacturers. Apple has no such need.

 

[chucker23n1]

They should have partnered with / purchased / licensed modems from Motorola. They are simply superior in terms of getting a decent signal in weak areas. My workgroup has one dude that always got a Motorola phone each year. He has always had superior reception deep inside buildings and such.

Motorola phones haven't been related to Motorola (the company who does radios) since early 2011, FWIW.

 

[Tagbert]

Yeah I wouldn't count on it, there's never been an Apple laptop with cellular connectivity.

It's something I can't wrap my head around. They are ignoring a whole segment of industry that issue laptops to field techs & other personnel that need secure access back to the office, with everything preconfigured.

Prior to this, the licensing fees Qualcomm charges made this a less attractive market. Qualcomm charges a variable fee relative to the price of the whole device which would be large for a MacBook. The market for cellular laptops is likely not a huge one as you can see by the limited number of laptops that offer it. Mac OS has not so far been optimized to recognize that it is on a metered connection and reduce the bandwidth use. That would need to be built into the OS.

Once Apple has an inexpensive in-house modem they can start including it in more devices, perhaps even integrating into the SOC without additional licensing fees and either enabling or disabling it for various models. Couple that with an updated OS that doesn't blow through the data caps in the first 2 hours and you may see cellular as a viable option for MacBooks.

 

[chucker23n1]

Apple hasn't ever used any 5G modems from Intel, have they? Like I said, the LTE portion is known to work but 5G is what got Apple to decide to settle with Qualcomm. Apparently it was still years away.

Indeed.

 

[deconstruct60]

it took apple less time to build intel-beating CPUs than in took to build damn cellular modem. curious as to why,

Less time? Apple didn't start doing their own CPU cores until the A4 ( 2010). A14/M1 2020. That is ten years. Can hand wave and say did it with the A12 but still 8 years.


Because Intel already had a mostly working 5G modem already. It ran hotter and consumed more power than Apple liked but it is was working.

This isn't being being built from scratch by a crew that has never done a 5G modem before.

That "not going to ship" modem was designed for custom Intel fab process. Apple would have to allow the designers to spin up on the design tools that Apple likes to use and the fab vendors Apple wants to leverage. ( Pretty good chance Apple won't be using TSMC for the far more analog RF module. So Apple has some design practice procedures to learn also ).

The design approach. How they want to pipeline updates. Making the modems specific only to the apple line up ( not trying to solicit other customers and use cases ). The former Infineon/Intel group was probably given some leeway to evaluate all the sub components with Apple general preferences and start over.

but this is more like AMD going from the Bulldozer/etc to Zen conversion than coming up with a modem from scratch. Getting to Zen 1 didn't take more than 3-4 years to do.

Most major chip designs have a 2-3 year pipeline to get out the door. The only reason why Apple / AMD / Intel / etc have yearly drops is largely due to concurrent design pipeline procuesses running at the same time. Start on next one before the first one is finished. So get results popping out the end of the pipelines at a steady pace.

Apple basically disrupted the results pipeline when they bought the Intel Modem group. There were probably multiple products in flight and Apple flushed them out and into the "recycle bin". Getting the pipeline restarted can take years if do a major overhaul and deep optimizations. Given Intel didn't have a competitive product, that would be a reasonable move.

 

[JPack]

Apple is pretty conservative. They aren't likely to integrate the 5G modem until they have worked out all the kinks. And they probably have already reached the limits of what SoC real estate they can support for 5 nm, 4nm and 3nm without the modem. They'll integrate the modem when it makes economic and business sense.

Do you really think Apple would deploy their 5G modem if there were "kinks" and they weren't good and ready? Is Qualcomm in a rush to delete Apple as a customer?

The reality is, it makes most business sense for Apple to separate the modem. Modem development is on a difference cadence compared to the main logic. You don't need to update it every year, nor does it need the most expensive litho process. Finally, the Pro/Max processors aren't expected to be updated annually. So an external modem makes the most sense.

Many people believe the myth of power savings because Qualcomm integrated the modem. No, it's because of vendor lock in. If you buy the Qualcomm modem, you must also buy the logic. It's purely a business play.

 

[deconstruct60]

It's something I can't wrap my head around. They are ignoring a whole segment of industry that issue laptops to field techs & other personnel that need secure access back to the office, with everything preconfigured.

dongle, hotspot , or iPhone for that. There are multiple solutions. Don't look as "sleek". But Apple also doesn't have a untattered history of not so hot WiFi reception. Throwing celluar on top of that into the "unibody" of the Mac also has issues. Just far less drama for Apple to have the antenna decoupled from the "thinnest al-lu-mini-um " chassis possible.

 

[jdb8167]

Do you really think Apple would deploy their 5G modem if there were "kinks" and they weren't good and ready? Is Qualcomm in a rush to delete Apple as a customer?

The reality is, it makes most business sense for Apple to separate the modem. Modem development is on a difference cadence compared to the main logic. You don't need to update it every year, nor does it need the most expensive litho process. Finally, the Pro/Max processors aren't expected to be updated annually. So an external modem makes the most sense.

Many people believe the myth of power savings because Qualcomm integrated the modem. No, it's because of vendor lock in. If you buy the Qualcomm modem, you must also buy the logic. It's purely a business play.

Well I do remember when Apple started using Intel 4G/LTE modems they hobbled the Qualcomm modems to match the lesser specs of the Intel. That is what I meant by "kinks". Doing a RF module on a modem is pretty different from designing a CPU or GPU and Apple has much more experience with those anyway.

I doubt power savings is particularly critical. The economic factor that will drive Apple to integrate the modem will be reducing package count and reducing BOM cost. The RF module is going to be pretty large though so I wouldn't expect that to be on the roadmap until maybe second generation 3nm. Just guessing though.

Edit: Another thought is that Apple will have experience with multi-chip modules soon with the likely upcoming Mac Pro SoCs. They might decide to put the modem on its own die.

 

[visualseed]

Apple hasn't ever used any 5G modems from Intel, have they? Like I said, the LTE portion is known to work but 5G is what got Apple to decide to settle with Qualcomm. Apparently it was still years away.

It's all speculation at this point, but if (and when) Apple puts their own 5G modems in their phones, they will work. They may not work perfectly (or they may), but they will work well enough. It's not like the 5G roll out has been going so smoothly that I could tell the difference between bad service and a bad modem anyway.

 

[mikethemartian]

it took apple less time to build intel-beating CPUs than in took to build damn cellular modem. curious as to why,

Why would you think designing a state of the art RF modem would be any easier than building a CPU?

 

[KindJamz]

it took apple less time to build intel-beating CPUs than in took to build damn cellular modem. curious as to why,

Cellular Modems are hard. Ask Intel.

 

[jdb8167]

It's all speculation at this point, but if (and when) Apple puts their own 5G modems in their phones, they will work. They may not work perfectly (or they may), but they will work well enough. It's not like the 5G roll out has been going so smoothly that I could tell the difference between bad service and a bad modem anyway.

If Apple is actually planning on using their own design on 80% of their cellular products in 2023, they probably already have it working at least well enough to know that they can ship it in a product. But doing 5G is another complex technology that Apple hasn't released to the public before. We've seen many times in the past, that just working isn't necessarily enough when public expectation is high—comparisons to Qualcomm are inevitable. The holding it wrong fiasco with the 4G antennas comes to mind.

 

[KindJamz]

I’m not gonna beta test the new apple modem. QC makes the best at this point. My 11PM with the Intel has problems at times. In fringe areas.

Hope apple improves cellular radios. Better coverage is always good

 

[haunebu]

Google decided to customize their own Tensor processor for the Pixel 6, which is manufactured by Samsung and based on the the Samsung Exynos. They're using the Samsung Exynos 5G modem instead of Qualcomm this year, and it isn't going well.

Google Pixel 6 Pro vs. Samsung Galaxy S21: Which One Wins At 5G?

The Google Pixel 6 Pro has a new modem in the US 5G game. We took it for a weekend of testing to see how it matches up against the Samsung Galaxy S21+ and Ultra.

www.pcmag.com

Qualcomm makes the best 5G modems, and it looks like nobody else even comes close. Why would we expect Apple to?

 

[citysnaps]

Skirting around patents...

Licensing IP.

 

[huge_apple_fangirl]

Why is everyone so sure that Apple's modem will beat Qualcomm's? I mean, as far as anyone can tell, they aren't ditching Qualcomm because of technical issues with their modem. It's because of cost reasons. And Apple isn't above putting in bad modems because of cost reasons (they used Intel and slowed the QC modems to match). All Apple has to do is match whatever current gen QC modem is in the iPhones and they can claim it's better. They don't need to match QC going forward.

 

[caribbeanblue]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

 

[haunebu]

Also wondering why people assume Apple's modem would replace Qualcomm's at the high end. It's likely the other way around. Apple's modem won't outperform or even match Qualcomm's, that's pretty much guaranteed. But Apple could put their in-house modem into low end products where performance isn't as critical. Sort of like how they first released the M1, and then attacked the high end with the M1 Pro and Max later on.

 

[RedTomato]

Yeah I wouldn't count on it, there's never been an Apple laptop with cellular connectivity.

It's something I can't wrap my head around. They are ignoring a whole segment of industry that issue laptops to field techs & other personnel that need secure access back to the office, with everything preconfigured.

Eh? Anything in the field that needs secure access to back to the office will run data through an encrypted VPN and use various security processes. Doesn't matter if the laptop is sending data via an ethernet cable or via its own cellular modem, or via wifi tethering to a phone.

Administratively, it is more convenient indeed to send out a laptop with its own internal cellular modem - easier than sending out a company phone plus laptop - but it doesn't buy you much extra in the way of security. One way or another, your data is still traversing the wider internet.

 

[Hyperchaotic]

Apple hasn't ever used any 5G modems from Intel, have they? Like I said, the LTE portion is known to work but 5G is what got Apple to decide to settle with Qualcomm. Apparently it was still years away.

They tested Intels 5G modem but were not happy with it, we don't know exactly why but the rumor was that it got very hot and used much more power than Apple was ready to accept.

The settlement with QC was said to have included better prices/deals for QC 5G modems for Apple, apart from a lot of other details ofcourse (lump sums of money already owed QC, etc). Again, just another rumor but it's not unusual things happen this way.

 

[thebeans]

Motorola phones haven't been related to Motorola (the company who does radios) since early 2011, FWIW.

I did not realize that. So Motorola phones do not have Motorola cellular radios in them? Do you know who makes their modems? In any case, from what I have seen for many years they have superior fringe area reception compared to iPhone, multiple different Samsungs and Pixels. Not sure if it is the modem manufacturer / model or the antenna design or what.

 

[name99]

Yeah I wouldn't count on it, there's never been an Apple laptop with cellular connectivity.

It's something I can't wrap my head around. They are ignoring a whole segment of industry that issue laptops to field techs & other personnel that need secure access back to the office, with everything preconfigured.

How much of that market also has to run (for good, or bad reasons) Windows-only software...
It's not going to do Apple any good to create such laptops only to have Spectrum Cable (or whatever) say they're irrelevant because they can't run some Custom Spectrum Windows app that was last updated fifteen years ago.