Intel to Auction Off Modem IP and Patents

[ksec]

Could this be another Tim Cook mistakes ?

Intel would have sold to Apple, Modem Business + Patents had Apple named a reasonable price. Now they have an auction which you can guarantee in the current climate of things this will be jacked up to multiple billions.

Of course another way of looking at it, is that no one wants to buy Intel's modem business. Apart from some Chinese Parties which I doubt would pass US security clearance. All the major players have their own Modem team now, apart from Apple, Xiaomi and BBK.

And would Apple really want some 3G-5G patents? It would means they will collect some money from every other Android maker as well, but it seems that is something not core to Apple's business.

 

[ROGmaster]

The Physics is universal and Apple has a massive staff of PhDs. Sorry, but RF Mesh theory is well researched to death at the academic level and Apple's superior SoC design knowledge with CPUs/GPGPUs/T2 chip DSP, now Afterburner FPGA programmable ASIC and more includes the teams talents to build modems. What they don't have is the IP of new implementations in the 5G arena to bring it to market.

So does Intel but they still failed to launch a 5G modem and their 4G modems were mediocre in general.
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Rocket science? Funny that Qualcomm can't leverage that "rocket science expertise" on processors. They couldn't design an SoC to punch themselves out of a wet paper bag.

You are exaggerating, Qualcomm's current Snapdragon 855 SOC is quite competitive in terms of both CPU and GPU performance and it's integrated Modem is superior to anything Apple has to offer right now.

 

[ReanimationLP]

So if Apple buys it, I wonder if they'll move it all up to Cupertino or leave it all in place in San Diego where it is now.

The Intel location where all the R&D is done is about 3 miles from Qualcomm. Most likely to poach QC employees.

 

[realtuner]

So does Intel but they still failed to launch a 5G modem and their 4G modems were mediocre in general.

The same Intel that's seen mediocre performance gains in their processors the last 5+ years? The same Intel that's taking forever to get to 10nm? The same Intel who never really took modems or mobile processors seriously? Don't take laziness or lack of commitment to imply Apple won't be able to deliver.

You are exaggerating, Qualcomm's current Snapdragon 855 SOC is quite competitive in terms of both CPU and GPU performance and it's integrated Modem is superior to anything Apple has to offer right now.

No exaggeration at all. The A12 is significantly faster and uses significantly less power. Oh, and it does this with 2 fewer "big" cores. Funny how people always forget that little tidbit of information. That makes the A12 even more impressive.

Qualcomm and Samsung both also realized that single core performance is very important for many workloads (not all algorithms/workloads can be split up over multiple cores), contrary to forum experts who try to diminish this number (mainly because Apple trounces everyone on single core). Qualcomm went with a 1+3+4 design where a single core is overclocked and given double the cache to handle single threaded loads. And it still comes up way short (3400 vs 4800 for the A12). Samsung went with a 2+2+4 design and gave both their single cores a higher clock and extra cache. Here they did much better (4200 vs 4800 for the A12) but still behind. When you factor in that the A12 is clocked at 2.5GHz (vs 2.8GHz for the 855 and 9820) the A12 cores are even more impressive.

From AnandTech on their test of the 855 and 9820:

The Adreno 640 this generation just seems quite conservative – Apple has taken Qualcomm’s performance crown in mobile and most importantly also the efficiency crown. Both the Snapdragon 855 and A12 are both manufactured on the same process node so it’s a valid Dragon-to-Apples comparison, and here Qualcomm is beaten by such a significant margin of which in the past we’ve only been used to seeing Qualcomm beat Arm with.

In the quest to find an answer on how much the actual process node impacts power efficiency between the 7nm Snapdragon and 8nm Exynos, I also went ahead and ran SPEC on the Cortex A55 cores of both chipsets. After a gruelling 11.5 hours of runtime we finally see that the little cores only post a fraction of the performance of the big core siblings. What is actually quite embarrassing though is that the power efficiency is also quite atrocious for the given performance. Here other blocks of the SoC as well as other active components are using up power without actually providing enough performance to compensate for it. This is a case of the system running at a performance point below the crossover threshold where racing to idle would have made more sense for energy.

Apple’s small cores are just such an incredible contrast here: Even though the absolute power isn’t that much bigger than the Cortex A55 cores, the Tempest and Mistral cores are 2.5x faster than an A55, which also results in energy efficiency that is around 2x better.

But hey, feel free to read Anandtech's review and see if you can find any quotes that show the 855 being better than the A12. I'm sure if you look really hard and concentrate on a very narrow spec, you might find something it's better at. But overall the A12 is substantially better than the 855 or 9820.

 

[justperry]

My iPhone 7 Plus factory unlocked ( Qualcomm) has better reception than my XS, both LTE and WiFi . My iPad 10.5 always pulled faster speed than my 12.9 iPad Pro. Intel Wasn’t doing it right.

Assumption: You are American. (Or...any other country with crappy providers).

I (read I with a big fat I) have no problems whatsoever here in Europe, amongst lots of others.

Oh...my Qualcomm modem downloads a webpage (Video or whatever) at 125 MB/s, Intel only downloads
at 115 MB/s....first world problems.
....
...You know what, it doesn't make a hell of a difference, especially not on a phone.

Gonna tell you what is slow:
I once was in *Indonesia, needed to send email, it took me 1 hour to login to my email provider, cost...$4 an hour, which doesn't seem like much but if you know $2 was the average wage a day back then you know that's a lot. Still isn't a lot more right now.


In the end couldn't even send email after 2 hours.

* Lived there for a decade later on.

 

[ROGmaster]

The same Intel that's seen mediocre performance gains in their processors the last 5+ years? The same Intel that's taking forever to get to 10nm? The same Intel who never really took modems or mobile processors seriously? Don't take laziness or lack of commitment to imply Apple won't be able to deliver.​

Actually they almost doubled the total performance in the last 3 years with their mainstream CPUs and 10nm has nothing to do with their CPU architecture.
Also Intel still has the best laptops CPUs on the market by far right now.
So yeah the same Intel that has a lot of money, experience and IP. That Intel indeed.
​

No exaggeration at all. The A12 is significantly faster and uses significantly less power.

It's impressive in synthetic benchmarks and on paper but in real world usage you can hardly spot any real and objective advantages that are relevant for general smartphone users.

Oh, and it does this with 2 fewer "big" cores. Funny how people always forget that little tidbit of information. That makes the A12 even more impressive.

Really? Even if A12's two big cores are actually larger then Snapdragon 855's 4 big cores put together? Funny how people always forget that little bit of information.

But hey, feel free to read Anandtech's review and see if you can find any quotes that show the 855 being better than the A12.

I clearly used the word competitive.
I must be a miracle that even if the A12 is so incredibly better than the Snapdragon 855 the experience of using two phones with these SOCs from a performance stand point is so similar is hard to distinguish them.

 

[Degerz]

The same Intel that's seen mediocre performance gains in their processors the last 5+ years? The same Intel that's taking forever to get to 10nm? The same Intel who never really took modems or mobile processors seriously? Don't take laziness or lack of commitment to imply Apple won't be able to deliver.​

​

Apple is the definition of lazy with a lack of commitment when it comes to cellular network technology standards so they may as well not deserve to have 5G ...

Those guys have had nearly zero representation at 3GPP thus far so for all of Apple's greatness in everything else why is it have they've not figured out something so 'simple' as RF technology as you imply ? Why on earth would Apple need Intel's wireless assets if you supposed that they could truly execute ?

Your posturing doesn't match up with reality BTW when Apple crumbles easily and submits their superiority to another party like Qualcomm ...