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Intel Exiting 5G Modems
- ndesaulniers 8y agoSurely in regards to the current top post on HN: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/04/qualcomm-and-apple-agree-to-drop-all-litigation/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/04/qualcomm-and-apple-ag...
- lucasmullens 8y agoCould you explain how that's related?
- unfoldedCravat 8y agoI believe GP may have been referring to this line (emphasis mine) in the article suggesting Apple will now be using Qualcomm chips again. Companies have reached a global patent license agreement and *a chipset supply agreement*
- wmf 8y agoApple currently buys 4G modems from Intel and presumably Apple is shopping for 5G modems. If Intel no longer makes 5G modems then Apple needs to buy them from Qualcomm. Or it could be the reverse: if Apple has decided to buy 5G modems from Qualcomm then Intel has no customers for its 5G modems and thus decided to cancel them.
- baybal2 8y agoIt is not like Qualcomm settles with Apple to get into Apple's cellphones, it is a concession made to make them drop Intel and still pay them royalties after Apple finishes its own modem. Apple been poaching Qualcomm's top radio engineers for years ...for work in their Chinese RnD centre (no non-compete enforcement there)
- ptlu 8y agoNon-competes are not enforced in California.
- baybal2 8y agoWell, they might be other reasons then. You don't normally haul a poached top tier employee from a first world country to China. My speculation is maybe their talks with Huawei were more fruitful than known to the public.
- mrybczyn 8y agoMaybe soon Apple could drop the "Designed in California", and just go 100% "Made in PRC". True story: I was born in a opressive communist dictatorship, escaped with my family to freedom and democracy. It's very hard to observe the vanguard of democratic capitalism, become 99% communist, with a couple guys in California rounding the corners and painting the boxes...
- mises 8y agoWouldn't it be suicide for a pro-privacy company to put Huawei gear in it's phones? Normally I would figure consumers just aren't that privacy-conscious, but with the current national security climate around Huawei, I think many more people are aware of the massive risks they pose.
- baybal2 8y agoTo begin with, work on physical layer of 5G NR is to big extend Huawei's and ZTE's effort as part of 3gpp Who will be your first option for supplier of 5G PHY chips other than standard's original authors?
- mises 8y agoQualcomm, I suppose. I personally think it's more likely that Apple wants to make its own. One thing it does do well is custom fabrication and optimization, which is why iPhones run better with less RAM than Androids and can have good battery life. I think they may be sick of the trouble caused by 3rd-party suppliers in this department.
- Spooky23 8y agoThe litigation between Apple and Qualcomm gave Intel a customer for a fledgling product line. Apple is a plum customer as they drive tons of volume for a single sku. That’s a big advantage that Apple has had — their tighter product lines allow them to commit to a large number of parts for long periods of time. The Intel reps mostly talk about storage these days. Quite a departure from the old days of high margin chips.
- jplayer01 8y agoI feel like it's the reverse, since the lawsuits really only started on the heels of Apple supposedly sharing secrets with Intel to help develop their baseband tech. The litigation was probably ended because Apple eventually realized that Intel wasn't able to come up with a decent baseband chip that could compete with Qualcomm, much less one that could satisfy quality constraints and volume production across all of Apple's product lines. Apple had to come to a deal with Qualcomm (at the very least, so they can potentially gain access to Qualcomm's IP). Intel either was already planning to throw in the towel or this was the straw that broke the camel's back. With Apple deciding to stick with Qualcomm (or their own homegrown chip), there's no potential market for an Intel 5G modem and no point in throwing more money after bad.
- eganist 8y agoThe Verge went into some amount of depth with the relationship between the two events: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18411332/intel-exiting-5g-smartphone-modem-market-apple-qualcomm-settle-dispute https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18411332/intel-exiting-5g...
- jrockway 8y agoI like how the forward-looking statement disclosure is longer than the press release itself.
- smaslennikov 8y agoSurely due to the recently top post on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674218
- lucasmullens 8y agoSurely? How are you sure of that when the post didn't mention any related reasoning? The weather forecasting thing isn't even new, it's just a blog post that happened to go out today.
- gboudrias 8y agoI thought it was the Qualcomm Apple settlement? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19676499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19676499 Surely it can't be a coincidence. Though the weather thing might not be either, but if so this was a very well coordinated response.
- nedp 8y agoI think it is: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18411332/intel-exiting-5g-smartphone-modem-market-apple-qualcomm-settle-dispute https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/16/18411332/intel-exiting-5g...
- 40acres 8y agoStock is jumping after hours, not surprised as modems really aren't a core competency of Intel.
- morpheuskafka 8y agoI'm wondering if Apple decided to settle with Qualcomm, and Intel scuttled a presumably low-selling business, or did Intel abruptly close the business prompting Apple to suddenly settle? Given that the settlement came in the middle of court arguments unbeknownst to the lawyers, I'm thinking the latter.
- Traster 8y agoHaving had a little experience in how those conversations go, my guess would be that Intel were doing everything they could to keep Apple's business, but between failure at the foundry level and failure to compete on the actual design level Apple has slowly made the decision that their generation needed to be with Qualcomm. So they'll have sorted the settlement and deal with Qualcomm whilst keeping the door open with Intel. Now that the deal with Qualcomm is finalized they can finally confirm to Intel what their draw down will be and since Intel can't make the volume they need without Apple they've been forced to close down the product line. Intel has a reputation for completely ripping up departments once they're 'refocusing' but they really only do that after the writing has been on the wall a while. I will be amazed if it slowly becomes clear their 5G backhaul business isn't going the same way though.
- metildaa 8y agoApple was Intel's only LTE modem client, Apple did everything they could for years to give Intel the secrets that made Qualcomm's modems so performant, yet Intel was still a half decade behind in modem sensitivity, leaving a huge gap betwewn Intel and Qualcomm/Samsung.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- metildaa 8y agoIntel couldn't make WiMax work right (too power hungry and low speed), their attempts to build an LTE chip have fared worse than Samsung and Qualcomm, to the point that they are a full 5 years behind their competitors, and their cable modem chipsets (Puma 6/7, used in the Xfinity converged gateway) are fatally flawed and DoSable with a few Kbps of traffic, while having horrible bufferbloat. At this point I think Intel's entire advantage over the past two decades was being on the bleeding edge of silicon processes, paired with a middling silicon design team and good firmware devs that could patch most flaws in microcode. The process lead has disappeared, and when working with RF frontends (LTE, WiMax, cable modems, WiFi) their ability to cover up implementation errors in the driver is limited. Intel's prospects for the next few years look dim in this context, given the tens of billions wasted on the aformentioned forays into making radio chipsets and the declining revenue of their legacy CPU market paired with serious manufacuting constraints that have hamstrung their supply chain.
- bgorman 8y agoTo me this is kind of strange, I thought Intel had a good reputation as far as Ethernet and Wireless drivers were concerned. Certainly much better than (old) Broadcom, Realtek, Ralink, ST and the like.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wmf 8y agoI wonder if all Intel's acquisitions have failed while homegrown efforts succeeded.
- metildaa 8y agoI specifically called out Intel's software team as competent/good. They are obviously able to take buggy silicon and make it do impressive things, but when it comes to shaping and interpreting analog RF waves it seems this is outside their capability to tune much beyond what they've done. Broadcom comparatively has crap drivers and decent silicon, meaning your cable modem works fine (with no bufferbloat or jitter issues), but good luck with that random WiFi chipset on Linux :P
- bgorman 8y agoIt is really amazing how much money Intel has thrown away chasing "mobile" dollars. First, they squandered billions trying to make mobile Socs, now the last part of the company that can get inside a cell phone is throwing in the towel as well. While Intel was doing all of this, it managed to squander away its core manufacturing competency as well. I have a feeling Intel will be the next HP, sliced and diced for parts - none of which resemble the company at its best.
- metildaa 8y agoWhen Intel was making mobile SoCs, they couldn't get everything onto one chip, nor were they able to make a LTE capable device. What they were able to produce were $100 tablets and phones for the low end of the market that were subsidized to the tune of ~$30ea, or in the case of Wal-Mart's $50 Intel Atom Android tablet, to the tune of $40 to $50 per device in subsidy.
- thechao 8y agoIt wasn’t squandered—I was able to use their investment in my personal growth as a springboard to a FAANG career.
- cdumler 8y agoI think the problem is that they believe they "squandered" supplying the iPhone CPU. They stated that mobile CPUs would never sell in quantity, so they weren't interested. Missing that boat, they've believed the need to be in front of mobile at any cost. I think Intel failed to realize that they had made the right call with iPhone: their very culture isn't about being innovative, but providing microcode flexibility at high instructions/watt. They had a chance to define servers, and still do. They should have been all over the whole spectre/meltdown/timing security issues and owned creating a secure server chip. Instead, they've fretted away so many options that they never had a chance to win. My two cents.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoIntel owned a big slice of the embedded ecosystem well into the 90's. They threw that all away to focus on high margin Pentiums.
- doe88 8y agoOMG this is huge, I can't fathom how a company with such level of engineering and talents can't/choose not to do it. At one point it's bigger than the bottom line or any other considerations, it's for the moral of the whole company.
- YinLuck- 8y agoWhat makes you think they still have top talent? Anyone with any ambition for the past decade would be drawn to ARM or one of the many fabless design teams built on ARM.
- lallysingh 8y agoAt some point the size of the business becomes it's largest performance factor. It loses the ability to use talent and to understand which risks to take.
- lawrenceyan 8y agoWhen Intel repeatedly says they're going to continue making the modems for the iPhone up to 2020 but now have shown themselves to have been blatantly lying, clearly this has to be illegal or at least warrant an investor lawsuit right?
- dwaite 8y agoYou don’t believe the 2019 iPhones (which will be the flagships until Sept 2020) will contain Intel LTE modems?
- lawrenceyan 8y agoDid you read the linked news piece before commenting? It says it directly there: > "The company will continue to meet current customer commitments for its existing 4G smartphone modem product line, but does not expect to launch 5G modem products in the smartphone space, including those originally planned for launches in 2020."
- bredren 8y agoUnless you’ve contracted with Intel you won’t know deceit.
- lawrenceyan 8y agoDid you work as a contractor at Intel?
- brooklyntechie1 8y agoWhat a coincidence that intel released this after Apple issued the press release about Qualcomm. Seems like Intel had some weight lifted up off their shoulders.
- dman 8y agoBig companies dont fail due to external forces, they fail because of internal dynamics. Everything apart from x86 is a hobby at Intel. Also think they are addicted to high margins and expect that a substantial portion of cost of a device goes to Intel components.
- gjsman-1000 8y agoEarly this morning: Apple and Qualcomm abandon lawsuits. Late this evening: Intel announces leaving modem business. Coincidence? I think not!
- craftyguy 8y agoIt's a coincidence unless you have any information to prove otherwise. Edit: apparently the very wise HN users would rather downvote a call for evidence and upvote a feels goods conspiracy theory. stay classy HN.
- alteria 8y agoFastest way to get downvotes is to complain about them
- rohan1024 8y agoThis is of topic. How do you downvote a comment? Is it disabled for new users or user should have specific karma? I have been here for years and I have decent karma I think
- areyouseriousxx 8y agoI have several friends that make $10+ per downvote on HN. So my guess is that the fastest way to get downvotes is to write something that someone with a marketing budget wants to remove.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gonzo 8y agoYet again, INTC + RF == 0.
- Abishek_Muthian 8y agoGood for iPhone users, now that Apple & Qualcomm are in the bed again; they will get decent 5G experience (or) at-least what everyone else is getting.
- londons_explore 8y agoIt's probably too late for this year's iPhone though, unless engineering teams have been working behind closed doors of both companies expecting this to be the case.
- dwaite 8y agoI very much doubt 5G iPhones were ever something we would see in 2019. The network deployments aren’t there yet, and Apple won’t have two SKUs for their flagship 2019 model to hedge their bets with 1st gen modems like other manufacturers.
- hyperrail 8y agoAnother commenter (metildaa) said Intel is 5 years behind the competition on their 4G LTE technology. I can't reconcile that claim with PC Magazine's tests of the iPhone XS's mobile performance: https://www.pcmag.com/news/364116/iphone-xs-crushes-x-in-lte-speeds-but-still-falls-short-of https://www.pcmag.com/news/364116/iphone-xs-crushes-x-in-lte... The PC Mag author, Sascha Segan, says repeatedly that the iPhone XS at worst only slightly trails the Galaxy Note 9 and other high-end phones with 2018 Qualcomm SoCs. To quote directly: > Between the three 4x4 MIMO phones, you can see that in good signal conditions, the Qualcomm-powered Galaxy Note 9 and Google Pixel 2 still do a bit better than the iPhone XS Max. But as signal gets weaker, the XS Max really competes, showing that it's well tuned. > Let's zoom in on very weak signal results. At signal levels below -120dBm (where all phones flicker between zero and one bar of reception) the XS Max is competitive with the Qualcomm phones and far superior to the iPhone X, although the Qualcomm phones can eke out a little bit more from very weak signals. We could say this is all Apple tuning the phone's antenna array and materials, but I find it extremely unlikely that would have compensated for "5 years" of Intel lag - back then LTE was several times slower in theory and practice. We could also say this is just Apple giving Intel all the secrets of modems that Intel couldn't figure out themselves. That could be more plausible, but again I'm doubtful, since Apple would have little incentive to hoard those secrets and then loan them to Intel instead of using them to build their own chips. Unless of course Apple stole those secrets from Qualcomm or someone else...?
- craftyguy 8y ago> Another commenter (metildaa) said Intel was 5 years behind the competition on their 4G LTE technology. Why didn't you just reply to their comment?
- hyperrail 8y agoThey made the same claim in 2 separate comment threads and I was unsure which to reply to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678578 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678578
- jbigelow76 8y agoSo earlier Apple and Qualcomm reach détente. Then Intel announces exit from the 5G modem space, meaning Intel isn't a viable alternative to Qualcomm as supplier had Apple and Qualcomm not made nice. Interesting timing of statements... ...but, Intel mentioned the IP they still retain in the 5G space. What's the over/under on Apple licensing Intel's IP and bringing modem dev in house (keeping in mind that would take a couple years at best to payoff) vs making a best case scenario of a working relationship with Qualcomm and using their tech?
- londons_explore 8y agoI suspect this is the case. Apple will have purchased IP and maybe entire teams from Intel.
- wtmt 8y agoNext year Intel will be hit harder when Apple announces Macs based on its A series ARM chips and transitions its entire Mac line to it by 2023 or 2024. This move by Apple will also prompt other PC manufacturers (a lot more than before) to move to ARM if Microsoft continues to play along well on ARM. Seems like Intel’s future is bleak, and the company may have to be broken into pieces.
- IntelMiner 8y agoI'd be curious to see where you've gotten such a bright future for ARM from. It feels very much like the "year of the Linux desktop" in being wishful thinking
- chipotle_coyote 8y agoWhile I think it's unrealistic to write Intel's CPUs off any time soon, ARM has been having a very bright present for years, haven't they? There are roughly 5x as many smartphones sold every quarter as there are PCs and the vast majority of those phones are using ARM-based CPUs -- in terms of units in use, there are way, way more of them out there than there are Intel CPUs. As for ARM CPUs seriously moving into the PC space, who knows. It hasn't happened yet, but there's an ever-increasing amount of smoke around the likelihood of ARM-based Macs. It's silly to think that in five years Intel will be a destitute, hollow shell of its former self -- but it's not silly to think that ARM-based PCs are going to not only exist, but be both common and seriously competitive.
- for_i_in_range 8y agoDoes anyone know what they mean by > "...and Other Data-Centric Opportunities" What does Data-Centric mean? Specifically, Data-Centric platforms that they keep referencing?
- liuliu 8y agohttps://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2017/02/10/intel-ceo-we-are-a-data-company.html https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2017/02/10/intel-c... Not sure if that is still true after Krzanich out.
- xbmcuser 8y agoWell now I get why Apple settled its lawsuits with Qualcomm suddenly or Qualcomm might have asked for a lot more money interesting how Intel announces this a day after the Apple and Qualcomm settlement
- mises 8y agoI'm sure Apple told Intel to hold the press release or they would sue them for breach. I can't really blame Apple hear; Qualcomm can be nasty and Apple wasn't wrong to not give up a huge advantage.
- londons_explore 8y agoI doubt Qualcomm was unaware. Lots of rumours spread within an industry but never make it out onto the internet.
- Guereric 8y agoI'm disappointed by this news because Intel was the only mobile modem manufacturer who was competitive (or nearly competitive) to Qualcomm in North America. Without Samsung, without Chinese OEMs, Qualcomm is unfettered in its monopoly here.
- londons_explore 8y agoMediatek isn't far behind. If they were to put actual decent CPU's in their SoC's (which is just a matter of licensing - switching out one ARM CPU for another isn't too hard), I think they could take a big share of Qualcomm's market.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- the_70x 8y agoobvious movement, intel have been sucking at modem design and performance compared with its rivals on LTE
- 01100011 8y agoIntel should buy Nvidia, drop their internal GPU efforts, and focus on regaining their CPU lead. It may be a futile effort, with the end of Moore's law and Dennard scaling making their previous approach less appealing, but they've got to try. Then again, if they bought Nvidia, they'd probably try to put an x86 inside the GPU...
- speedplane 8y ago> Intel should ... focus on regaining their CPU lead. I think they are focused on that. They've been trying to bring their 10nm process to market for years. It's now 3 years past their initial projections. Moore's exponential curve is certainly dead, the big question now is whether performance will improve linearly or something worse.
- TomMarius 8y agoPerformance can still increase exponentially on average. There are still undeveloped ways of hyper-performant computing, such as chemical, biological (bacterial), DNA-based, optical, maybe quantum... and of course we would start replacing silicon with graphene once its production finally takes off, which should lead to 3D chips. Spintronics is another very interesting field.
- speedplane 8y ago> There are still undeveloped ways of hyper-performant computing ... Agreed, but none of the technologies have reached the marketplace, and it's entirely unclear how long it will take for them to develop. If it takes decades, any exponential curve is toast.
- TomMarius 8y agoThat is not true. You can't claim that. I'm saying that on average it's going to be exponential - e.g. even if it takes 100 years, the jump will be so huge it'll be an exponentially large step.
- frou_dh 8y agoSome vindication for the oft-maligned SemiAccurate site. Article five months ago: https://semiaccurate.com/2018/11/12/intel-tries-to-pretend-they-have-5g-silicon-with-the-xmm-8160/ https://semiaccurate.com/2018/11/12/intel-tries-to-pretend-t...
- TheOperator 8y agoMore like "veryaccurate" am i right?
- dtaht99 8y agoI keep hoping intel will fix bufferbloat across all their lte/cablemodem/dsl/etc gear. It would improve their end user experience enormously. I even know a few folks that would help....
- NotPaidToPost 8y agoCellular technology is hard and complex. I remember Broadcom thought "no problem, we churned out Wifi solution with 50 people so how hard can this cellular thing be for us?"... Well, they crashed and burned. You need massive teams of people who know what they are doing to build cellular chipsets with the necessary software stack.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- TorKlingberg 8y agoThe cellular modem market has absolutely crashed in the last decade. Broadcom, ST-Ericsson, Nvidia and Intel have all left the market. I may be forgetting someone. That leaves basically just Qualcomm and Mediatek (on the lower end) left. Huawei and Samsung have something too. Apple and Samsung will have to make their own modems now, if they don't want to be dependent on Qualcomm. This is certainly not good for competition.
- dade_ 8y agoSony? https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201601/16-008E/index.html https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201601/16-008E/inde...
- SomeHacker44 8y agoI wonder if the timing of this announcement was determined by the timing of the Apple/Qualcomm settlement. In particular, if Apple encouraged Intel to delay this announcement until they reached a settlement with Qualcomm, to get better terms with Qualcomm.