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Why did Intel kill off their modem program?
- rathel 7y agoApparently Intel's cable modem SoCs (Puma 6) are garbage as well, demonstrating ridiculous jitter level. https://www.badmodems.com/ https://www.badmodems.com/ I'm also an unfortunate owner of an Arris box. If only the person who showed me this website could have done it a few years ago...
- Causality1 7y agoWow that's a huge issue and I'm amazed I was totally ignorant of it until just now. Looks like my last modem upgrade happened just before Arris switched to Puma 6.
- postpawl 7y agoMy brother recently got a free modem from his ISP with the defective puma chipset and he ended up keeping it because the defect wasn’t that noticeable. This guy said it added about 8ms of latency: https://forums.timewarnercable.com/t5/Connectivity/arris-tm1602a-puma-chipset-needs-fixing/td-p/143859 https://forums.timewarnercable.com/t5/Connectivity/arris-tm1... So maybe not a huge issue, but personally I’d just spent the $40 on a SB6183 that doesn’t have the issue.
- snuxoll 7y agoMy former ISP forced one on me and it would constantly DOS itself and drop my connection multiple times a day. (Different model, same chipset)
- AstralStorm 7y agoBad software is common in these kinds of routers. Even across software updates you can get a dying router, much less a hardware change. That's because the software is essentially lowest bidder and untested. (Note: running in a lab is not the same as adversarial testing.)
- syn0byte 7y agoI honestly thought this article would be about the Puma6 itself. Imagine my surprise when it wasn't.
- rootusrootus 7y agoSome Arris boxes are affected, not all. I have a SB8200 which uses the Broadcom chip. Also the SB6183 is fine. The one you want to avoid is the SB6190.
- tenebrisalietum 7y agoThe SB6183 is rock solid.
- X-Istence 7y agoI've been using the SB6190, and I haven't had any issues with latency or jitters. Even all of the testing didn't show any issues. Mine is a hardware version 3 though.
- manderley 7y agoThe issue will absolutely show up. Just download pingplotter and set the interval to 0.3 seconds. The latest firmware simply mitigates the problem a bit, all Puma 6 chips are affected. It's most noticeable in online games, for regular usage, you probably won't see much of a problem.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoBeen using an Arris SB6141 for perhaps 5 years and never really had a problem. Looks like its not on the list.
- martinald 7y agoVirgin Media in the UK literally shipped millions of these Puma 6 modems. Never fixed. Believe they are now replacing them slowly.
- winter_blue 7y agoHmm... this is interesting. When buying a laptop, I've always looked for one with a Intel Wi-Fi chip[1], because the Broadcom and most of the Killer wireless chips have really bad Linux driver support. Maybe for PCs, Intel 's Wi-Fi chips are still the best? [1] My most recent purchase had the Intel® Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265. This is a list of all of Intel's wireless PC chips: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/59484/intel-wireless-products.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/...
- unicornfinder 7y agoThe problem is with the modems, not the WiFi.
- benj111 7y agoThe parents question is reasonable. If Intel can ship decent WiFi chips it begs the question why not modems.
- et2o 7y agoCan anyone explain or point to a resource for why is was so difficult for Intel to make a competitive modem? Is it technical, IP-related, or both?
- umvi 7y agoMy guess is that it's mostly IP-related. You can't use any of Qualcomm's patents when designing a modem, and they have a ton of modem-related patents, including lots of the "common sense" solutions anyone would discover while developing a modem. Hence, you have to develop a modem with two arms tied behind your back which is quite difficult.
- csours 7y agoCould Intel talk publicly about this if they wanted to? Is the fear of lawsuits so great that they just don't want to talk about it? Living in the information age is great! I just wish I had more information.
- thefounder 7y agoTalking the patents policy bad wouldn't help then much. They like patents too...
- nix0n 7y agoSaying publicly "our modems are bad because..." is probably not a great way to sell more modems. Once they're out of the business, they have no incentive to say why, they just focus on other things. Since Intel has not always played fair against AMD, they don't really want to talk about anticompetitive business practices in a market they're exiting anyhow.
- ak217 7y agoAny examples? How does Broadcom do it? And if Broadcom and others do it by licensing from Qualcomm, why wouldn't Intel do the same?
- 7y ago
- frandroid 7y ago> so each phone shipped with about $100K of slush funds wrapped around it. I have the phone, I would have preferred a house. > Update April 18, 2019 @ 8:18am: My math is off, it is closer to $10K/phone, $8750 to be exact. I will still take the cash option. yikes!!
- systemBuilder 7y agoIntel laid off most of their CPU designers 5 years ago. That's when their CPUs became frozen in time and it's when the marketing morons took over the executive boardroom. It is well known that they are mostly a semiconductor physics shop and don't have a clue about how to design circuits or software. The challenge of making a good modem is mostly in the handoff software (most calls are in some sort of handoff most of the time) and software is the Intel Achilles Heel.
- perardi 7y ago"Intel laid off most of their CPU designers 5 years ago." Got a citation for that?
- acdha 7y agoThat’s a lot of big claims with nary a citation in sight. Their software might not be consistently amazing (you might want to demonstrate that you understand how many different things they work on) but it’s not clueless and I’d especially want to see support for the idea that they don’t know how to design circuits. I mean, AMD is competitive now but they sure seem to be working hard at it – are they clueless too?
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago'Scuse me? As much as I like AMD more, Intel is pretty competent: They design motherboards, and share their designs with their OEM's- much like reference GPU's. They (via acquisition) have some of the better wired NIC's on the market (their features for sure beat Realtek's, and are more or less on par with Mellanox's.) [Intel doesn't] have a clue about how to design circuits or software. Them managing to even produce a single CPU and have it work would disprove that.
- gsich 7y agoHiding shit behind AT-commands not disclosed to the public is one thing that sucked with Intel modems.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gsich 7y agoHaving NDAs (you still find the information) on AT-commands is one reason why they sucked. But Qualcomm is not any better.
- davidmr 7y ago“On top of this the Intel modems consumed vastly more energy to do their slower work than Qualcomm, a trend that SemiAccurate has personally measured in the labs across multiple generations of Intel modems but is not at liberty to disclose exact figures on, sorry.” Why not? Presumably they would be opening themselves up to some liability?
- sdf6798 7y agoMaybe the modem circuits do a bit more than just modem function which could explain the higher energy consumption.
- x0x0 7y agoA guess -- they do market intelligence on contract, and the customer that paid for the work (competitors, large investors trying to figure out bets on qualcomm, etc) didn't agree to have the data shared.
- fragmede 7y agoPhrased differently: paid through the nose for the exclusive rights to the results of the investigation.
- fspeech 7y agoThe analysis that Intel’s lower peak throughput makes the iPhone 30% less efficient with spectrum stands on very shaky grounds. The effect needs to be coupled with the probability that 1gb rate is actually allocatable to a phone: which requires exceedingly favorable conditions and is therefore rare in common usage. Secondly even when peak rate is available but not utilized the impact to spectrum efficiency tends to be minimal as the unused capacity can be allocated to other users (a complete analysis is complicated as it depends on the figure of merit that carriers use). There’s no way carriers would even accept a 10% reduction in bandwidth efficiency, even from Apple.
- mrweasel 7y agoBesides Qualcomm who else is left producing 4G/5G modems?
- ksec 7y agoHuawei, Samsung, Mediatek, Unisoc ( Spreadtrum ), Intel and Apple in the future. If you exclude Unisoc and Intel, the other could represent a total of up to 70% Smartphone Market. That is assuming Mediatek continues to dominate the lower end, and the top 3 vendor, Samsung, Huawei, Apple's market share are stable. There are quite a few other players focusing on M2M LTE solution.
- orev 7y agoWhen Intel announced they were closing the division immediately after Apple’s settlement, I just assumed the whole point of Intel being in the market was to give Apple some leverage over Qualcomm. Possibly in return for delaying the Mac switchover to ARM a few years.
- ggm 7y agoI know, like, and respect Qualcomm engineers so it pains me to say I have qualms about ownership of IPR so fundamental to RF comms like this. I'm seriously unconvinced it's serving a wider public interest. LTE is a standard. It should be RAND to implement good FPGA for it.
- HocusLocus 7y agoAs soon as I loaded the page and glanced that "lookie here it's real!" tone of the photos I resolved to Photoshop some goofy something onto an Intel chip as a joke. IMAGINE MY SURPRISE when the article turned out to feature photo fakery!
- leandrod 7y agoEchoes of Risc & VLIW: i432AX, i80860, i80960, Itanic… Intel killed its good non-x86 products, coincidentally all grown out of itself: DEC Alpha, the StrongARM. SSD quality is a joke. The Register must be having a field day too.