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Apple in 'Advanced Talks' to Buy Intel's Smartphone Modem Chip Business
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They aren’t buying the business - they don’t intend to sell modems to anyone. They are buying the patent portfolio and the technical know-how. Maybe employees, too.
Sadly, that is not how modem chips do work. While you could produce superior and faster cpus than your competitors. Modem chips have a maximum performance limit the signal strenght and antenna construction allows. Qualcomm modems are already very close to that theoretical maximum. So even if Apple does some magic like on their Ax chips the end result may only be something like +5% faster than Qualcomm. It would be much better for Apple to stay focused on the CPU/GPU. This deal will mostly be about cross-licensing patents or saving costs. Nothing to get excited about from the consumer's point of view.
“Performance” isn’t just raw throughput. Efficiency is part of it. It is quite possible apple can achieve qualcomm-like wireless throughput and signal lock while burning a lot less power.
Where did either of the comments you quoted (mine included) say anything about making the modems faster? You're countering an argument that wasn't made. There have been numerous arguments made about Intel's modem chips performing less well than Qualcomm's (more about usability in weak signal scenarios than about speed), plus Apple doesn't like the licensing terms for Qualcomm chips. Apple has demonstrated their ability to engineer chips that perform precisely the way Apple wants (speed, power usage, thermal load, etc.). I'm saying they may be able to do similarly with modem chips, producing something that performs more to their liking than the Intel modems, while not buying chips from Qualcomm.
In some ways this is a good thing but in others I think it is a bad thing with Apple buying up intel for the industry as a whole. Reason be it will make everyone else even more relent on Quadcom. I would rather see Apple go in with a few other companies and form a separate company that they would have an insisted and provide a good competitor to Quadcom.
Intel is already out of the business. So it’s not a question of Apple taking the Intel option away from the rest of the industry. It’s a question of whether Apple buys them and keeps the employees employed, or whether the patents are sold off to patent trolls who go around suing everyone.
The public doesn't really think "Modem" when they think "connecting my phone to the internet via LTE/5G network", so freeing up the "M" prefix seems to call it a "Modem" seems a bit off the mark. (Most non-techy people, if they recognize the word "modem" at all, they think back to dialup, or possibly a cablemodem.)
They didn't use "A" for accelerometer (or "G" for gyroscope, etc.), for the "Motion" coprocessor, they picked a name they thought could convey an idea to the public. I'd expect this to be a "Cellular" coprocessor, or "Wireless" coprocessor, or some such.
Please describe how Apple designing (and let's be clear here, they will be designing and not manufacturing) its own cellular IP moves it towards being more of a vertical monopoly. It gives it no more or less power to sell iOS devices so I'm assuming you have some "novel" definition.