It is likely that more wireless technologies (bluetooth and wifi) will be merged into the chip in future versions.There's also the potential that a good portion of the logic moves into future A/M series chips themselves
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Apple Unveils 'C1' as First Custom Cellular Modem
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I believe it has more to do with Qualcomm charging a percentage of device price instead of charging a flat price on modem and licensing(double dipping).
Not even close, they were never chasing single thread performance they’ve always gone for performance per Watt. In some workloads they excel like video encoding because the chips have hardware encoding built in. Apple know their audience and hit the mark well while Intel etc. chase benchmarks which very few asked them to do, although gamers are an exception
It's really not. But keep letting apple off the hook with cutting corners. I could see if this was an actual "cheap" phone but this is not so no excuse other than the apple tax.
I'm sure there'll be some vague comparisons that skew the performance....as usual.
I would think that for Macs high performance is more crucial than for a phone, thus requiring mmWave, and that’s not included in the C1.
I think Macs will be the last products that a C modem will be introduced to, if ever
You clearly have no idea about the performance of the M chips. They are currently they fastest chips overall for laptops (unless you want some of those monster gaming laptops no professional would use because they weight 7 kg) and the Max/Ultra versions have graphics performance rivalling many graphic cards.
So, yes, they can also do “raw” performance.
Indeed, the Snapdragon Elite can be faster on single threaded performance.
And of course there are server CPUs by many manufacturers, but do we really want to compare against those 128-256 core monsters that suck an inordinate amount of power?
It takes YEARS to develop a modem in-house. It is even more complex that developing a new CPU microarchitecture. So when Apple acquired intels modem division in 2019 NOBODY expected it to come out in 2020, of before 2024 for that matter.
I know because it is my job.
Also worth mentioning are the ongoing "vulnerabilities" in Qualcomm chips that just happen to be backdoors allowing state-level spying on communications (remember Edward Snowden?). I'm sure this is a factor in Apple's decisions, they just would never talk about it in marketing.
“Qualcomm spies on smartphone users, sends personal data to Qualcomm,” German security firm Nitrokey warns - Tech Startups
"During our security research, we found that smartphones with Qualcomm chips secretly send personal data to Qualcomm." In 2021, Edward Snowden, a former NSA whistleblower, issued a warning regarding national security. He said that “the greatest danger to national security has become the...techstartups.com
Apple are a US company. If the government asks something, they have to comply. You see them resist the FBI, not the NSA.
As for data sent, most connected products from all manufacturers send home telemetry to improve QoS. Whether this is “personal data” seems to me an extrapolation.
Why do people want cellular connectivity in a laptop? Is using a phone as a personal hotspot that bad?
The single threaded performance of, for instance, the M3 is stunning. So you can have both performance per watt and absolute performance. With NEON code, and its “short” 128-bit vectors, thanks to its ability to issue several instructions in parallel, I even have tasks that perform similarly to AVX512 on recent intel CPUs.
Well, consider your account is from 2012 I guess you haven't been reading Macrumors comments. But happy to dig into that yourself.
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Most certainly not a monopoly, they’re not even the market leader. Unless you mean that Qualcomm has a monopoly on all the modems they make. Which, THAT specific type of monopoly isn’t generally called monopoly. It’s called “products a company produces and sells”.
Additionally, other helper chips Apple’s produced in the past have found themselves on the die of the SoC. If this ends up on the die of some future M series to support the iPad cellular, then it’s just a ‘free’ feature they can enable on anything they put it in.
What’s different with Apple, is that MOST of what the competition ships performs poorer than the lowest end in any Mseries generation. It’s part of their AMD/Intel’s business model, they MUST have really poor performing solutions at the low end, or folks would just buy that and be good with it.
For Apple, the lowest end will always have impressive performance and your average person will get good use out of it. One CAN pay for more, but, over time, fewer and fewer people will really benefit from that additional performance.
It helps lower cost overall.
It is like iPhone chip R&D helped subsidize the R&D cost of Mac chips.
Over 80% of the work has already been done for the Mac SoC.... so Apple just needed to fund less than 20% of the Mac-specific R&D to make it laptop/desktop chip.
Hell, the current iPhone chip's more powerful than any non-Xeon Mac made.
Oh so you think laptops are the only computers. Got it. You’re wrong though, perhaps too busy looking at Apple graphs which have no labels or numbers. M chips are great but they’re not the fastest.
Backdoors are backdoors, and metadata is still useful for all sorts of tracking.
Separately, info coming out also shows Qualcomm have been rather poor players in many ways. Glad Apple is getting away from them.