iPhone 6 Said to Feature Faster Qualcomm MDM9625 LTE Modem with LTE-Advanced Support

[Keirasplace]

In theory, a faster chip would consume less power. Because the chip would be mostly inactive most of the time. Some areas of the chip need to be active all the time. Same reason a very fast chip in smartphones is a good idea even if in theory you don't need all that power.

Of course, that only works if the reception is not horrible. That's probably why some people have LTE draining their battery, while 3G does not. When in a strong LTE area with an efficient chip, LTE should win.

 

[zipa]

...it doesn't matter because unless you have "connections" or are the very wealthy or carrier executives, you can't afford a non throttled connection.

24,90 € / month for a non-throttled connection from my carrier.

 

[theheadguy]

Quite confused why everyone in the U.S. is so excited about faster LTE. The bandwidth caps here are so low (the naysayers will eventually realize this as well; also, queue the people who scream they aren't capped). The faster the LTE, the faster you hit your cap.

 

[McTaste]

Finally, Verizon will be able to **** me at warp speed.

 

[Evil Spoonman]

Some facts to contribute to this article...

- Presently very few operators are executing Carrier Aggregation. Australia will not have CA active until next year.
- CA is less important in markets where you can already find 20MHz of contiguous frequency. It will be a great advantage in markets which have disparate 5MHz or 10MHz bands which can be then aggregated to a 20MHz+ network.
- Many networks around the world are capable of running up against the boundaries of Category 3 LTE. The move to Category 4 will be good for reasons other than just CA.
- A hindrance for greater LTE capability is the inability to build more antennas into handsets. 2x2 MIMO is currently what the iPhone 5S has (Tx has a switch, which is why Tx is roughly half of Rx). Expect the iPhone 6 to be 2x2 again.
- Do not expect Apple to support another antenna chain for simultaneous EVDO voice and LTE on Verizon. VoLTE is on the way.
- MDM9625 is the obvious choice for inclusion in the iPhone 6. It was quite clear this was going to happen immediately after the 5S was announced a year ago. MDM9635 is not ready for this scale of production yet unless major changes are made to its design (lithography for one).

- LTE should not drain more power than WCDMA/EVDO. As you go further from a tower your phone boosts its transmit power. If you are in an area with poor coverage expect to pay a power penalty which will scale with the amount you use the radio. Note that often LTE can be much more efficient because it is a protocol that does not depend on high power antennas. Rather on wide carriers at lower powers. It is also much faster than 3G so it goes to sleep sooner and more often than 3G can. All of you experiencing power issues on LTE, there is an issue with your device or your environment.


An unrelated thought. Anybody questioning the need for faster LTE, more RAM, faster and more efficient SoCs or similar, really needs to reevaluate their position. Improved specs drive improved experience, drive new experiences. There is no argument to be made today for good enough in nearly any technology we possess. If you think it is good enough, then you don't understand what compromises were made in its construction.

 

[critter13]

Spark

Will this enable the iPhone 6 to take advantage of the Sprint Spark network? Yes, some of us are on sprint

 

[krravi]

It's not worth anything if your carrier is throttling your speed. I am with AT&T and my phone shows 4G LTE but the speed is just 10 Mbps on average in and around the city where I live.

"Apple is trying to give you great hardware? Watch us make it a moot point by negating the speed. We need to have an upper hand in this else Apple will be unstoppable."

That's probably what carriers must be thinking.

 

[mdelvecchio]

Who cares... I turn off LTE otherwise my phone doesn't last for 2 hours!

sounds like you need to get your broken phone fixed.

 

[bigchrisfgb]

Yeah it sucks. I am in the UK and am lucky to just about get a 3G signal, no 4G towers near me and I doubt there will be. In the UK they really only bother with city's and motorway's, anywhere else the operators don't pay much attention to. I haven't even bothered with a 4G contract because of this even though they are pretty cheap for us.

Actually your highly likely to get 4G since 99% of the country will be connected. Even rural areas will get 4G because the government isn't prepared to pay for fibre optical cables to remote areas and would prefer it if people in remote areas were given broadband via 4G, even if it means remote areas will only have coverage from one provider. That the advantage to the networks announcing mast sharing deals.

Also motorways are not earmarked for an improved signal, the population around a section of motorway is what determines if a certain section gets upgraded or not, a motorway being there has no bearing on a networks decision to install 4G unless there is some sort of development around the motorway.

 

[Prof.]

Do carriers in the us even have speeds that high?

I've gotten 80mbps down with "XLTE" on Verizon. With this new chip it would be interesting to see if we can get 100+mbps.

 

[MacSince1990]

I understand you're nit picking, but isn't it really understood at this point that when discussing consumer data rates we are discussing bits and not bytes?

Certainly not by everyone. If the OP had known it, he would have used the correct nomenclature.

Especially 10, 15 years ago, no one seemed to have a clue. Not everyone's caught up yet.

 

[DJsteveSD]

People do that?

----------

Yes, I do that and I am a people. It's actually quite sad that some iPhone users can't talk and browse at the same time.

you can on AT&T

 

[crisss1205]

Quite confused why everyone in the U.S. is so excited about faster LTE. The bandwidth caps here are so low (the naysayers will eventually realize this as well; also, queue the people who scream they aren't capped). The faster the LTE, the faster you hit your cap.

That is completely false. A 3 MB image is still a 3 MB image regardless of the download speed.

Faster LTE means less latency and increased bandwidth to when we finally switch to VoLTE. Also, the faster the download, the quicker the request time, and that means better battery life.

 

[TimUSCA]

Well, you see, most of us don't just leave it in our pockets for the entire day.

I use it constantly. But I guess you should know that since you apparently know me so well.

 

[theheadguy]

That is completely false. A 3 MB image is still a 3 MB image regardless of the download speed. Faster LTE means less latency and increased bandwidth to when we finally switch to VoLTE. Also, the faster the download, the quicker the request time, and that means better battery life.

A 3MB image? It's practically instantaneous already.

 

[osofast240sx]

A 3MB image? It's practically instantaneous already.

What he is getting at is the speed has nothing to do with data consumption.

 

[D-Dave]

Some facts to contribute to this article...


- MDM9625 is the obvious choice for inclusion in the iPhone 6. It was quite clear this was going to happen immediately after the 5S was announced a year ago. MDM9635 is not ready for this scale of production yet unless major changes are made to its design (lithography for one).

Hm, all I could find about the 9635 is that it is
a. faster
b. more power efficient (due to die shrink)
so it seemed to me that the 9635 was the obvious choice for the iP6...

It would be great if you could share your knowledge about design and lithography problems qualcomm has with the 9635.

 

[jlabute]

Sata3

I could be wrong, but aren't the speeds probably 150 Mbps and 300 Mbps... not 150/300 MB/s? A megabit is 1/8th a megabyte, and may SSDs can't transfer at 300 MB/s. No hard drives can.



Actually, while his assumption was incorrect, it was also an honest question. Your response on the other hand was both dead wrong and unnecessarily flippant.

NAND and RAM have nothing in common. One is a form of permanent storage, one is temporary storage, and they work completely differently. It's like comparing your hand to a storage facility and saying your hand is better because it's more versatile and can move.

Also it's theoretically possible to chain enough NAND together to get higher R/W speeds than RAM, which, incidentally, doesn't scale particularly well with increased # of channels. Latency's another issue, but given these two technologies have nothing in common, it's also a non-issue.

SATA3 is 6Gb/s which gets you above 300MB/s (750MB/s)... although the platter based hard drives are much slower. You can only read data from the platters at around 60 to 80MB/s or so.

 

[BeSweeet]

Quite confused why everyone in the U.S. is so excited about faster LTE. The bandwidth caps here are so low (the naysayers will eventually realize this as well; also, queue the people who scream they aren't capped). The faster the LTE, the faster you hit your cap.

Hmm... T-Mobile? I used 74.4GB last month.

 

[jlabute]

amazing speeds

What I find amazing is that we will soon have 300Mb/s and the cell companies can handle that bandwidth so easily... yet charge us an arm and a leg for tiny amounts of monthly bandwidth. (especially up here in Canada). Last thing I need to do is reach my cap in only 15 seconds at 300Mb/s. The cost of data is a rip off. Of course, we get data on these plans and it fuels these faster and faster radios that few people want to afford.

I could get a text/voice plan for $25. I pay $55... it is like $30 goes to data for only 500MB for my current plan. I think it is time to say NO to data ;-)

 

[bn-7bc]

Neat—now my LTE data plan will go up in smoke faster than ever! It's like giving you a Ferrari with a half gallon of gas in the tank. You'll have a lot of fun for a few minutes—just don't expect to make it very far!

well, if your plan does not meet your requirements it's time to considdr a change. I olso have LTE and can pull down ~40Mbps, do I use bandwith intensive services all thr time? No, but the spped i nice to have the few times i need it remember LTE is no replscement for fixed broadnd (cable, dsl, fiber) my USD0.02

 

[MyDataMyProbs]

...it doesn't matter because unless you have "connections" or are the very wealthy or carrier executives, you can't afford a non throttled connection.

my family of 4 have 15 GB of LTE data a month. my little
brother uses less than 1(but lots of text) and my mom and dad use their iPhone like a regular phone - for the most part. Giving me about ~12 GB of data a month. and our plan is only 120$. that's totally worth it. IMO

----------

I could be wrong, but aren't the speeds probably 150 Mbps and 300 Mbps... not 150/300 MB/s? A megabit is 1/8th a megabyte, and may SSDs can't transfer at 300 MB/s. No hard drives can.




Actually, while his assumption was incorrect, it was also an honest question. Your response on the other hand was both dead wrong and unnecessarily flippant.

NAND and RAM have nothing in common. One is a form of permanent storage, one is temporary storage, and they work completely differently. It's like comparing your hand to a storage facility and saying your hand is better because it's more versatile and can move.

Also it's theoretically possible to chain enough NAND together to get higher R/W speeds than RAM, which, incidentally, doesn't scale particularly well with increased # of channels. Latency's another issue, but given these two technologies have nothing in common, it's also a non-issue.

I like when people like you post. I learn cool stuff without feeling stupid. A+ for you sir!

 

[Evil Spoonman]

Hm, all I could find about the 9635 is that it is
a. faster
b. more power efficient (due to die shrink)
so it seemed to me that the 9635 was the obvious choice for the iP6...

It would be great if you could share your knowledge about design and lithography problems qualcomm has with the 9635.

The 9x35 series of basebands from Qualcomm was designed for production on TSMC's 20nm fabs. The same fabs that pretty much everybody except for Intel is trying to get capacity on now. The rumour is yields aren't the greatest yet, which is why we are not seeing a wave of 20nm chips from all the fabless folks like Nvidia, AMD, and Qualcomm. There are only a few 20nm designs floating around in the wild that I know of at this point and none of them move iPhone numbers. That wave will likely come early next year when yields pick up and product pipelines can align.

Apple would have locked down the hardware design on the iPhone 6 months ago. There is no way they would be insane enough to make a bet on availability of a non-critical part. Especially with their history of always going modest on the radios. Double especially considering most networks have other bottlenecks before you even get to the limited CA and higher 20MHz speeds supported by Cat4 LTE.

I could see Apple betting big on the SoC at 20nm, but not the radio. If the iPhone 6 has MDM9635 I will eat my hat. I will enjoy eating my hat too, because a better radio makes me happy. However, my money remains on MDM9625.

 

[Exhale]

One critical aspect of any wireless communication people seem to continuously fail to grasp is that only one device can send or receive at a time.

That means that the faster your connection, the less time it will spend blocking other devices. Alternatively, the more data you can get out of your assigned timeslot. Your device can only send and receive during the timeslot A-B, so its critical to get as much out of that timeslot as you can - as during C-Z other devices will be using the channel and your device will be required to shut up. Obviously, if your device can receive 200KB in its timeslot, then doubling the throughput of the communication between you and the transmitter means you'll get 400KB in that timeslot.

Wireless speeds are always advertised when you have 100% of the timeslots - for obvious reasons however you'll never have 100%. You'll have, generally, a fraction of that. So if yo have a 150mbps link, and get 10% of the timeslot - then you're limited to receiving 15mbps. If you have a 300mbps, with a limit of 10% of the timeslots - you'll receive 30mbps.

However, the faster the devices get, the more likely they are to be able to reduce the amount of timeslots they reserve - meaning those timeslots are opened up to other devices which do require them. So instead of maybe having only 10% of the time, you might be able to get 15% - because other devices no longer reserved that. That means we now push our throughput from 30mbps, to 45mbps.

Thats 3x faster than what we started with, which we got from a 2x link increase.

 

[krravi]

One critical aspect of any wireless communication people seem to continuously fail to grasp is that only one device can send or receive at a time.

That means that the faster your connection, the less time it will spend blocking other devices. Alternatively, the more data you can get out of your assigned timeslot. Your device can only send and receive during the timeslot A-B, so its critical to get as much out of that timeslot as you can - as during C-Z other devices will be using the channel and your device will be required to shut up. Obviously, if your device can receive 200KB in its timeslot, then doubling the throughput of the communication between you and the transmitter means you'll get 400KB in that timeslot.

Wireless speeds are always advertised when you have 100% of the timeslots - for obvious reasons however you'll never have 100%. You'll have, generally, a fraction of that. So if yo have a 150mbps link, and get 10% of the timeslot - then you're limited to receiving 15mbps. If you have a 300mbps, with a limit of 10% of the timeslots - you'll receive 30mbps.

However, the faster the devices get, the more likely they are to be able to reduce the amount of timeslots they reserve - meaning those timeslots are opened up to other devices which do require them. So instead of maybe having only 10% of the time, you might be able to get 15% - because other devices no longer reserved that. That means we now push our throughput from 30mbps, to 45mbps.

Thats 3x faster than what we started with, which we got from a 2x link increase.

That's some interesting info. But I am still wondering if at any given location if the tower can only transmit to only one device at any time?(however small that duration is)...

I gather that cell phone service is like insurance. If everyone claims their benefits at once, the service goes kaput.