7 ms·

How are Huawei, Apple and Samsung beating Qualcomm so easily? Did Qualcomm just beat Intel in the mobile market and then just become complacent with patents?

by homero 8y ago

thefounder 8y ago
One reason may be that they are better sponsored by the gov. Some kind of tech dumping.
- Klover 8y ago
  That could only apply to Huawei if I understand what you mean.
  - god_bless_texas 8y ago
    This is one thing I can't tell if I'm being "tin-foil hatty" about. What is embedded in that processor?
    - ahje 8y ago
      That argument could easily be reversed: Why wouldn't the Chinese be worried about bugs embedded in foreign tech used for sensitive tasks like military applications? In both cases it's more a matter of trust than anything else. Since it's more about trust, having more actors on the market is a good things, as it gives more options for the rest of us.
    - natch 8y ago
      It’s also possible Huawei is getting hassled by the US because it is not susceptible to US government attempts to embed such things on behalf of the US, as some (not all) other companies might be. Like you I can’t tell how crazy this idea is. I’m open to your tinfoil hat theory too, but both can be true.
- llampx 8y ago
  For Huawei, that's pretty much a given. Doesn't explain Apple and Samsung though. For Qualcomm, I would be surprised if their bread and butter ARM CPUs weren't mobile CPUs. Why stick with reference designs if they could tweak them or come up with higher performing ones? The Apple iPhone CPUs from two years ago are still trading blows with the latest Snapdragons. That's crazy.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    IIRC, Apple just spends more; they have more transistors. This is a luxury that is harder for Qualcomm to afford, as their customers wouldn't put up with it.
    - mschuster91 8y ago
      > IIRC, Apple just spends more; they have more transistors. Also, Apple has a full ARM license and full control over the OS and the software that runs on it. Which means it is very well possible that they have extended the instruction set to accelerate real-world JS performance.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        That was a rumor floating around - that WebKit took advantage of new A12 instructions. It wasn’t true at the time. They may have released the patch since then. https://twitter.com/saambarati/status/1049202132522479616 https://twitter.com/saambarati/status/1049202132522479616
        mschuster91 8y ago
        It's not just about WebKit. The remainder of the OS, including the graphic stack, is most likely to be optimized as hell for the A12 CPU.
        StillBored 8y ago
        There is a _LOT_ to be said for gaining a few %5 here and there improvements. Apple can both optimize their software for a very limited set of micro-architectures (a luxury that doesn't exist on android which runs on everything from tiny in order cores to larger more general purpose OoO cores) as well as optimize the cores themselves for an exact instruction sequences they determine to be critical for _their_ OS/applications/power envelope. This means their cache sizes/latency/TLBs/ROB buffers/frequency/power profiles/etc are decided not based on what generates a good specCPU score but what generates a good iOS/safari experience. Its a complete vertical integration and no one should be surprised that a general purpose kernel (linux) running a AOT/JIT'ed environment on top of an os abstraction layer (android) on top of processors frequently designed to exist in applications that aren't phones gets beaten on a phone centric benchmark. Call me when someone gets a big hadoop benchmark or dpdk results on an apple core.
- mtgx 8y ago
  And also Qualcomm seems to have been forced into giving away all of their server chip designs to the Chinese, too: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/ That's what you get from frothing at the mouth over "entering the huge Chinese market" by giving away all of your IP and tech through coerced "joint ventures" only to later see yourself kicked out of the market and some multi-billion dollar Chinese competitors selling your tech much more cheaply. And there's this sweet irony, too: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/u-s-star-witness-in-qualcomm-antitrust-suit-china-s-huawei?srnd=premium https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/u-s-star-... If you think all of this is far-fetched, do read on Nortel and Huawei's "joint venture", which led to the demise of Nortel and the domination of Huawei in Canada: https://www.lightreading.com/nortel-huawei-kill-jv/d/d-id/628439 https://www.lightreading.com/nortel-huawei-kill-jv/d/d-id/62... https://www.assemblymag.com/blogs/14-assembly-blog/post/90631-did-outsourcing-and-corporate-espionage-kill-nortel https://www.assemblymag.com/blogs/14-assembly-blog/post/9063... https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60-minutes-torpedoes-huawei-in-less-than-15-minutes.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60... That's not to downplay the idiocy of Qualcomm's board and leadership, which also played a huge role in all of this, as well as Qualcomm being involved in multiple antitrust lawsuits. The board and leadership should have been fired at least two years ago. They allowed their greed to stay in the way of the company's technical progress and decided to make money from bullying other companies instead of continuing to improve their products (most of which are just rehashed stock Arm designs these days).
  - entity345 8y ago
    Nortel didn't disappear because of Huawei. Chinese are used as scapegoats for everything these days. I used to work for Nortel and they went the way of the dodo because they were like Nokia (which ended the same way. I worked with them at some point as well...): Too bureaucratic, too slow, not hungry anymore, poor management. For their last CEO they ended up paying $12 million to Motorola because that guy breached the non-competition agreement he had when he took the job at Nortel... Just an example.
    - 8y ago
- showbufire 8y ago
  Huawei have contracts from the govt just like lots of the American tech companies. And speaking of govt sponsorship, Samsung is definitely one of them, if you know the history about memory chips competition and how they become one of the monopolies.
  - tooltalk 8y ago
    Samsung, a monopoly? I don't know why anyone would say that unless you are a mainlander Chinese/Taiwanese. And what gov't contracts? Unlike what China is doing today, there was no such overt protectionist gov't policies implemented here. Much of the demand for tech products and R&D were driven by the cold war between the WW2 and the fall of Berlin Wall. The stylized fact that there are now fewer than a few US memory makers, namely Micron and Intel, from two dozens in the 70's and 80's demonstrates how little the gov't contract has done to "protect" the industry. China's policy of forcing foreign companies to give up their IP for access to domestic market and seeding unlimited gov't subsidy is based on the Japanese model in the 80's. Their model however fell apart as Japan's economy declined and the Japanese companies focused on quality, not on mass manufacturing to compete with emerging South Korean competitors like Samsung. Unlike Japan's large domestic market, South Korea had very little market of their own and was geared toward purely for export. It didn't coerce foreign companies to drop all their patent lawsuits or future lawsuit like the Chinese gov't reportedly demanded Samsung and SK Hynix last week. Needlessly to say, equating China's outright IP theft to the industry policy of the US or South Korea is a bit asinine. * Noh, "Samsung, SK Hynix: Pay fines, or drop all existing or future patents lawsuits; China demands South Korean companies to give up their IP", Hankyung Economic Times, Dec 26, 2018 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=TT&sl=ko&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fm.news.naver.com%2FrankingRead.nhn%3Foid%3D015%26aid%3D0004068207%26sid1%3D101%26ntype%3DRANKING https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=TT&sl=ko&tl... * Kang, JoonKyu, A study of the DRAM industry, 2010, MIT PhD Thesis https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/59138/659514510-MIT.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/59138/6595145...
    - ksec 8y ago
      Samsung as a whole ( Not Just Samsung Electronics ). Many Korean could have argued the other way around, because Samsung controls the government. Credit where Credit's due, Samsung's Electronics R&D is absolutely one of the best on the planet. But it doesn't clear them as being clean.
samfisher83 8y ago
They really aren't. You should read anandtech article about sd vs exynos. The exynos kills sd in geek bench but in real life performance sd does better. The issue is these things are in tiny enclosures. They will just start throttling after a while. In this case it's a server chip so it's a little different.
baybal2 8y ago
Qualcomm's only real advantage as a company is killer patent portfolio, and lobbying power to sue every competitor out of the market. There were 10 mainstream Smartphone SoC available on the open market during 3g era, but only 2 in 4g (Mediatek and Qualcomm, with Samsung being out of competition due to their non-compete treaty with Qualcomm.) It is only because Qualcomm can't go against Mediatek on its home soil, they went after their channel, and clients in courts. I believe that Huawei's decision to home source its own SoC was also in part dictated by them being afraid of channel risk (i.e. Mediatek going down to lawsuit, or the civil war restarting) BTW, if anybody remembers the company called Allwinner that was all the rage during tablet boom. I have 100% certain info that they too got into secret non-compete with Qualcomm in exchange for distribution rights of their low-end chips for 10 years.
- homero 8y ago
  And there's Broadcomm who simply vanished after 3G
- tooltalk 8y ago
  First, wasn't Infineon always on the 3G/4G scene? > It is only because Qualcomm can't go against Mediatek on its home soil, they went after their channel, and clients in courts. Qualcomm, or wireless patent holders in general, never go after component makers; as a long-held industry practice, they always go after the handset makers for maximum royalty. That practice has been upheld by regulators around the world -- though there is a lawsuit by the FTC to change that at Apple's behest now. This also presumably allows new entrants to enter the wireless chip business and, therefore, increase competition. Qualcomm further is not exactly known for lawsuits, though it always seems to be fighting regulators around the world. It reportedly initiated fewer than 3 lawsuits in the past two years -- now compared to Apple's 90+ pending lawsuits.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    > First, wasn't Infineon always on the 3G/4G scene? No, plainly speaking. There was never was a real SoC from them. Intel bought an already dead business from Infineon. > Qualcomm, or wireless patent holders in general, never go after component makers; as a long-held industry practice, they always go after the handset makers for maximum royalty. No, anybody with a real business, and not living off patent trolling will not do that, and did not do that. Only QCM really have no head on their shoulders there to risk everything in a retaliatory lawsuit every time. > That practice has been upheld by regulators around the world No, completely not the case. I worked in electronics business for close to 12 years now, and I know few things about how patent law actually works in real world. Qualcomm was show to the door great many times by courts during their peak patent trolling a decade ago, in I think more than 10 countries.

How are Huawei, Apple and Samsung beating Qualcomm so easily? Did Qualcomm just beat Intel in the mobile market and then just become complacent with patents?

by homero 8y ago

How are Huawei, Apple and Samsung beating Qualcomm so easily? Did Qualcomm just beat Intel in the mobile market and then just become complacent with patents?

thefounder 8y ago

One reason may be that they are better sponsored by the gov. Some kind of tech dumping.

Klover 8y ago
That could only apply to Huawei if I understand what you mean.
- god_bless_texas 8y ago
  This is one thing I can't tell if I'm being "tin-foil hatty" about. What is embedded in that processor?
  - ahje 8y ago
    That argument could easily be reversed: Why wouldn't the Chinese be worried about bugs embedded in foreign tech used for sensitive tasks like military applications? In both cases it's more a matter of trust than anything else. Since it's more about trust, having more actors on the market is a good things, as it gives more options for the rest of us.
  - natch 8y ago
    It’s also possible Huawei is getting hassled by the US because it is not susceptible to US government attempts to embed such things on behalf of the US, as some (not all) other companies might be. Like you I can’t tell how crazy this idea is. I’m open to your tinfoil hat theory too, but both can be true.
llampx 8y ago
For Huawei, that's pretty much a given. Doesn't explain Apple and Samsung though. For Qualcomm, I would be surprised if their bread and butter ARM CPUs weren't mobile CPUs. Why stick with reference designs if they could tweak them or come up with higher performing ones? The Apple iPhone CPUs from two years ago are still trading blows with the latest Snapdragons. That's crazy.
- rsynnott 8y ago
  IIRC, Apple just spends more; they have more transistors. This is a luxury that is harder for Qualcomm to afford, as their customers wouldn't put up with it.
  - mschuster91 8y ago
    > IIRC, Apple just spends more; they have more transistors. Also, Apple has a full ARM license and full control over the OS and the software that runs on it. Which means it is very well possible that they have extended the instruction set to accelerate real-world JS performance.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      That was a rumor floating around - that WebKit took advantage of new A12 instructions. It wasn’t true at the time. They may have released the patch since then. https://twitter.com/saambarati/status/1049202132522479616 https://twitter.com/saambarati/status/1049202132522479616
      - mschuster91 8y ago
        It's not just about WebKit. The remainder of the OS, including the graphic stack, is most likely to be optimized as hell for the A12 CPU.
        StillBored 8y ago
        There is a _LOT_ to be said for gaining a few %5 here and there improvements. Apple can both optimize their software for a very limited set of micro-architectures (a luxury that doesn't exist on android which runs on everything from tiny in order cores to larger more general purpose OoO cores) as well as optimize the cores themselves for an exact instruction sequences they determine to be critical for _their_ OS/applications/power envelope. This means their cache sizes/latency/TLBs/ROB buffers/frequency/power profiles/etc are decided not based on what generates a good specCPU score but what generates a good iOS/safari experience. Its a complete vertical integration and no one should be surprised that a general purpose kernel (linux) running a AOT/JIT'ed environment on top of an os abstraction layer (android) on top of processors frequently designed to exist in applications that aren't phones gets beaten on a phone centric benchmark. Call me when someone gets a big hadoop benchmark or dpdk results on an apple core.
mtgx 8y ago
And also Qualcomm seems to have been forced into giving away all of their server chip designs to the Chinese, too: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/ That's what you get from frothing at the mouth over "entering the huge Chinese market" by giving away all of your IP and tech through coerced "joint ventures" only to later see yourself kicked out of the market and some multi-billion dollar Chinese competitors selling your tech much more cheaply. And there's this sweet irony, too: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/u-s-star-witness-in-qualcomm-antitrust-suit-china-s-huawei?srnd=premium https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/u-s-star-... If you think all of this is far-fetched, do read on Nortel and Huawei's "joint venture", which led to the demise of Nortel and the domination of Huawei in Canada: https://www.lightreading.com/nortel-huawei-kill-jv/d/d-id/628439 https://www.lightreading.com/nortel-huawei-kill-jv/d/d-id/62... https://www.assemblymag.com/blogs/14-assembly-blog/post/90631-did-outsourcing-and-corporate-espionage-kill-nortel https://www.assemblymag.com/blogs/14-assembly-blog/post/9063... https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60-minutes-torpedoes-huawei-in-less-than-15-minutes.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60... That's not to downplay the idiocy of Qualcomm's board and leadership, which also played a huge role in all of this, as well as Qualcomm being involved in multiple antitrust lawsuits. The board and leadership should have been fired at least two years ago. They allowed their greed to stay in the way of the company's technical progress and decided to make money from bullying other companies instead of continuing to improve their products (most of which are just rehashed stock Arm designs these days).
- entity345 8y ago
  Nortel didn't disappear because of Huawei. Chinese are used as scapegoats for everything these days. I used to work for Nortel and they went the way of the dodo because they were like Nokia (which ended the same way. I worked with them at some point as well...): Too bureaucratic, too slow, not hungry anymore, poor management. For their last CEO they ended up paying $12 million to Motorola because that guy breached the non-competition agreement he had when he took the job at Nortel... Just an example.
  - 8y ago
showbufire 8y ago
Huawei have contracts from the govt just like lots of the American tech companies. And speaking of govt sponsorship, Samsung is definitely one of them, if you know the history about memory chips competition and how they become one of the monopolies.
- tooltalk 8y ago
  Samsung, a monopoly? I don't know why anyone would say that unless you are a mainlander Chinese/Taiwanese. And what gov't contracts? Unlike what China is doing today, there was no such overt protectionist gov't policies implemented here. Much of the demand for tech products and R&D were driven by the cold war between the WW2 and the fall of Berlin Wall. The stylized fact that there are now fewer than a few US memory makers, namely Micron and Intel, from two dozens in the 70's and 80's demonstrates how little the gov't contract has done to "protect" the industry. China's policy of forcing foreign companies to give up their IP for access to domestic market and seeding unlimited gov't subsidy is based on the Japanese model in the 80's. Their model however fell apart as Japan's economy declined and the Japanese companies focused on quality, not on mass manufacturing to compete with emerging South Korean competitors like Samsung. Unlike Japan's large domestic market, South Korea had very little market of their own and was geared toward purely for export. It didn't coerce foreign companies to drop all their patent lawsuits or future lawsuit like the Chinese gov't reportedly demanded Samsung and SK Hynix last week. Needlessly to say, equating China's outright IP theft to the industry policy of the US or South Korea is a bit asinine. * Noh, "Samsung, SK Hynix: Pay fines, or drop all existing or future patents lawsuits; China demands South Korean companies to give up their IP", Hankyung Economic Times, Dec 26, 2018 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=TT&sl=ko&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fm.news.naver.com%2FrankingRead.nhn%3Foid%3D015%26aid%3D0004068207%26sid1%3D101%26ntype%3DRANKING https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=TT&sl=ko&tl... * Kang, JoonKyu, A study of the DRAM industry, 2010, MIT PhD Thesis https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/59138/659514510-MIT.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/59138/6595145...
  - ksec 8y ago
    Samsung as a whole ( Not Just Samsung Electronics ). Many Korean could have argued the other way around, because Samsung controls the government. Credit where Credit's due, Samsung's Electronics R&D is absolutely one of the best on the planet. But it doesn't clear them as being clean.

samfisher83 8y ago

They really aren't. You should read anandtech article about sd vs exynos. The exynos kills sd in geek bench but in real life performance sd does better. The issue is these things are in tiny enclosures. They will just start throttling after a while. In this case it's a server chip so it's a little different.

baybal2 8y ago

Qualcomm's only real advantage as a company is killer patent portfolio, and lobbying power to sue every competitor out of the market. There were 10 mainstream Smartphone SoC available on the open market during 3g era, but only 2 in 4g (Mediatek and Qualcomm, with Samsung being out of competition due to their non-compete treaty with Qualcomm.) It is only because Qualcomm can't go against Mediatek on its home soil, they went after their channel, and clients in courts. I believe that Huawei's decision to home source its own SoC was also in part dictated by them being afraid of channel risk (i.e. Mediatek going down to lawsuit, or the civil war restarting) BTW, if anybody remembers the company called Allwinner that was all the rage during tablet boom. I have 100% certain info that they too got into secret non-compete with Qualcomm in exchange for distribution rights of their low-end chips for 10 years.

homero 8y ago
And there's Broadcomm who simply vanished after 3G
tooltalk 8y ago
First, wasn't Infineon always on the 3G/4G scene? > It is only because Qualcomm can't go against Mediatek on its home soil, they went after their channel, and clients in courts. Qualcomm, or wireless patent holders in general, never go after component makers; as a long-held industry practice, they always go after the handset makers for maximum royalty. That practice has been upheld by regulators around the world -- though there is a lawsuit by the FTC to change that at Apple's behest now. This also presumably allows new entrants to enter the wireless chip business and, therefore, increase competition. Qualcomm further is not exactly known for lawsuits, though it always seems to be fighting regulators around the world. It reportedly initiated fewer than 3 lawsuits in the past two years -- now compared to Apple's 90+ pending lawsuits.
- baybal2 8y ago
  > First, wasn't Infineon always on the 3G/4G scene? No, plainly speaking. There was never was a real SoC from them. Intel bought an already dead business from Infineon. > Qualcomm, or wireless patent holders in general, never go after component makers; as a long-held industry practice, they always go after the handset makers for maximum royalty. No, anybody with a real business, and not living off patent trolling will not do that, and did not do that. Only QCM really have no head on their shoulders there to risk everything in a retaliatory lawsuit every time. > That practice has been upheld by regulators around the world No, completely not the case. I worked in electronics business for close to 12 years now, and I know few things about how patent law actually works in real world. Qualcomm was show to the door great many times by courts during their peak patent trolling a decade ago, in I think more than 10 countries.