5 ms·

Can 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?

by et2o 7y ago

umvi 7y ago
My 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 ago
  Could 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 ago
    Talking the patents policy bad wouldn't help then much. They like patents too...
  - nix0n 7y ago
    Saying 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 ago
  Any examples? How does Broadcom do it? And if Broadcom and others do it by licensing from Qualcomm, why wouldn't Intel do the same?
  - pkaye 7y ago
    There are some mentions that Broadcom doesn't fairly license these patents. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=dc82e3a3-7fdc-46e5-9323-d3d42d2b6e08 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=dc82e3a3-7fdc...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ndesaulniers 7y ago
  What? I thought the LTE spec had certain required technologies that were patented and supposed to be licensed for a reasonable fee, and QC just got in trouble for tying those licenses to chip sales.
  - mbreese 7y ago
    There were a lot of reported issues with Qualcomm licensing for standards essential patents. In particular they weren’t necessarily abiding by FRAND rules.
ksec 7y ago
Lots of reasons. My guess, looking from the outside and talking with some telecom engineers. 1. Intel's own Culture and Incompetence. There is a very long lead time in Semiconductor industry. What you are seeing today are likely work started 3 to 4 years ago. But even having that in mind, the sale of Infineon to Intel were completed in early 2011. It was announced and preparation ( assuming they did prepare ) in 2010. And the first Intel self Fabbed Modem? The Intel 7560 Modem, on 2018 iPhone. 2. What ever politics they had at Intel, Pat Gelsinger was out in 2009. Like I said there are 4 years of his work release after he left. That is 2013. And you can now look at what Intel has achieved in 2014 - 2019. 3. Intel Custom Foundry is a complete mess. And anything non-CPU are done on the custom foundry node. Such as Modem and Altera's FPGA. And we all know their 10nm is 2 years late, or 3 years depending on how you count them. 4. It is not IP, or technically hard to design a working LTE modem. It is extremely hard to design a modem that works well in all edge cases around the world. And if I remember correctly from the first day of Qualcomm/ Apple trial. The intel Modem were priced closer to $20, not $10 as SemiAccruate Report. Qualcomm spends lots of money in Field Testing as well as working with all Mobile Phones vendor / MNO in testing. When Qualcom has 100s of clients and design wins they get much more testing done and data than all other players on the market. There is a reason why Qualcomm has the best modem on the planet and you are only paying a slight premium for it. Its because they throw money into testing. While Intel, well I don't know what they have done in those 8 years, at least they have Apple as a client ( For a brief moment ). While you may question how much Qualcomm charges for their Patents, ( In my opinion, not a ridiculous amount as media likes to paint that picture ). I surely would pay $20 - $30 more RSP for a quality Qualcomm Modem, than saves the money on a worse Intel Modem. 5. I have always felt there is a strong Intel Culture that makes any acquisition fail to have any synergy.
- madengr 7y ago
  I wonder how (3) is going to affect Altera, given TSCM (thus Xilinx) is already at 7 nm?
- mcphage 7y ago
  > The intel Modem were priced closer to $20, not $10 as SemiAccruate Report. I think SemiAccurate reported that Intel's price was $-10, even.
bsder 7y ago
Money. Anything other than x86 has such abysmal margins (by Intel standards) that nothing other than x86 will ever get the resource it needs. Until the company is at an existential crisis level (a la the DRAM changeover--and even that almost killed Intel), this simply will not change.
dchichkov 7y ago
Anyone knows, what the composition of the team was like? Where was development based? Who was heading it?
DSingularity 7y ago
The structure of intel creates a culture pits teams against each other. It doesn’t foster collaboration. My guess is that middle management rebelled whenever Intel was trying to be strategic in their roadmaps/acquisitions. Imagine trying to pivot a company in such a toxic environment.
nimrody 7y ago
I used to work for DSP/C -- one of the first companies Intel had bought in order to enter the Cellular market (later sold to Marvell Semiconductors which, after a few years, exited the cellular market and closed the division) There are a few objective reasons making it difficult to compete in the cellular business and a few Intel specific reasons: - Intel's process and FABs are designed for high performance x86 chips. Not low power cellular chips. Given that the margins on x86 chips are also way higher, there was no incentive to change anything. So the cellular modems were produced using a power hungry process and were less competitive. - At the time, Qualcomm was holding most essential patents required for implementing 3G (and probably now 4G). Licensing fees are enormous burden on anyone entering the market. - Cellular technology undergoes tons of tests by operators, handset manufacturers, base station equipment manufacturers. It takes a lot of effort (and manpower) to execute all these tests and make the required modifications. It doesn't help that the reference platform is Qualcommm. So if you had made different a different tradeoff than Qualcomm, you may do better in some tests but will have to make fixes for other tests. - Some problems are only seen in the field and only in certain places (due to quirky base station equipment, non standard deployment, etc.) Again, it takes a lot of effort to detect and fix those issues. - Qualcomm (The big incumbent in this business) is huge: over 30,000 employees. No way you can compete if all you have is about a 1000-engineers in your cellular division. By the way, the only successful cellular maker I'm aware of besides Qualcomm is MediaTek (Taiwan) which: - Concentrates on the low end market. - Ships complete solutions. You can find lots of different phones which are essentially a single MTK design with very few modifications.
- ksec 7y ago
  >- At the time, Qualcomm was holding most essential patents required for implementing 3G (and probably now 4G). Licensing fees are enormous burden on anyone entering the market. From what I know, you don't need any licensing to design and implement a 3G/4G/ or even 5G Modem. ( Unless you want CDMA Support ) It is the ODM or Phone Manufactures that has to take care of it. Much like you don't need a license to include H.264 decoder, not even to ship it. But you will need to pay if you decide to enable it. >only successful cellular maker I'm aware of besides Qualcomm is MediaTek Mediatek is awesome. By concentrating on low end, something Qualcomm doesn't want to do, they have an economy of scale for both Fabs Capacity, Design and Modem testing. And just a note, Huawei, assuming they will Settle with Qualcomm, and Samsung both have their own Modem Implementation. These two represent close to 40% of market. And if you include Apple down the line, that is roughly 55%. Adding Mediatek, that is close to 70%. And that is excluding BBK and Xiamoi plans to make their own modem, together they represent 15% to 20%. Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly as media likes to paint it.

Can 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?

by et2o 7y ago

Can 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 ago

My 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 ago
Could 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 ago
  Talking the patents policy bad wouldn't help then much. They like patents too...
- nix0n 7y ago
  Saying 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 ago
Any examples? How does Broadcom do it? And if Broadcom and others do it by licensing from Qualcomm, why wouldn't Intel do the same?
- pkaye 7y ago
  There are some mentions that Broadcom doesn't fairly license these patents. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=dc82e3a3-7fdc-46e5-9323-d3d42d2b6e08 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=dc82e3a3-7fdc...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ndesaulniers 7y ago
What? I thought the LTE spec had certain required technologies that were patented and supposed to be licensed for a reasonable fee, and QC just got in trouble for tying those licenses to chip sales.
- mbreese 7y ago
  There were a lot of reported issues with Qualcomm licensing for standards essential patents. In particular they weren’t necessarily abiding by FRAND rules.

ksec 7y ago

Lots of reasons. My guess, looking from the outside and talking with some telecom engineers. 1. Intel's own Culture and Incompetence. There is a very long lead time in Semiconductor industry. What you are seeing today are likely work started 3 to 4 years ago. But even having that in mind, the sale of Infineon to Intel were completed in early 2011. It was announced and preparation ( assuming they did prepare ) in 2010. And the first Intel self Fabbed Modem? The Intel 7560 Modem, on 2018 iPhone. 2. What ever politics they had at Intel, Pat Gelsinger was out in 2009. Like I said there are 4 years of his work release after he left. That is 2013. And you can now look at what Intel has achieved in 2014 - 2019. 3. Intel Custom Foundry is a complete mess. And anything non-CPU are done on the custom foundry node. Such as Modem and Altera's FPGA. And we all know their 10nm is 2 years late, or 3 years depending on how you count them. 4. It is not IP, or technically hard to design a working LTE modem. It is extremely hard to design a modem that works well in all edge cases around the world. And if I remember correctly from the first day of Qualcomm/ Apple trial. The intel Modem were priced closer to $20, not $10 as SemiAccruate Report. Qualcomm spends lots of money in Field Testing as well as working with all Mobile Phones vendor / MNO in testing. When Qualcom has 100s of clients and design wins they get much more testing done and data than all other players on the market. There is a reason why Qualcomm has the best modem on the planet and you are only paying a slight premium for it. Its because they throw money into testing. While Intel, well I don't know what they have done in those 8 years, at least they have Apple as a client ( For a brief moment ). While you may question how much Qualcomm charges for their Patents, ( In my opinion, not a ridiculous amount as media likes to paint that picture ). I surely would pay $20 - $30 more RSP for a quality Qualcomm Modem, than saves the money on a worse Intel Modem. 5. I have always felt there is a strong Intel Culture that makes any acquisition fail to have any synergy.

madengr 7y ago
I wonder how (3) is going to affect Altera, given TSCM (thus Xilinx) is already at 7 nm?
mcphage 7y ago
> The intel Modem were priced closer to $20, not $10 as SemiAccruate Report. I think SemiAccurate reported that Intel's price was $-10, even.

bsder 7y ago

Money. Anything other than x86 has such abysmal margins (by Intel standards) that nothing other than x86 will ever get the resource it needs. Until the company is at an existential crisis level (a la the DRAM changeover--and even that almost killed Intel), this simply will not change.

dchichkov 7y ago

Anyone knows, what the composition of the team was like? Where was development based? Who was heading it?

DSingularity 7y ago

The structure of intel creates a culture pits teams against each other. It doesn’t foster collaboration. My guess is that middle management rebelled whenever Intel was trying to be strategic in their roadmaps/acquisitions. Imagine trying to pivot a company in such a toxic environment.

nimrody 7y ago

I used to work for DSP/C -- one of the first companies Intel had bought in order to enter the Cellular market (later sold to Marvell Semiconductors which, after a few years, exited the cellular market and closed the division) There are a few objective reasons making it difficult to compete in the cellular business and a few Intel specific reasons: - Intel's process and FABs are designed for high performance x86 chips. Not low power cellular chips. Given that the margins on x86 chips are also way higher, there was no incentive to change anything. So the cellular modems were produced using a power hungry process and were less competitive. - At the time, Qualcomm was holding most essential patents required for implementing 3G (and probably now 4G). Licensing fees are enormous burden on anyone entering the market. - Cellular technology undergoes tons of tests by operators, handset manufacturers, base station equipment manufacturers. It takes a lot of effort (and manpower) to execute all these tests and make the required modifications. It doesn't help that the reference platform is Qualcommm. So if you had made different a different tradeoff than Qualcomm, you may do better in some tests but will have to make fixes for other tests. - Some problems are only seen in the field and only in certain places (due to quirky base station equipment, non standard deployment, etc.) Again, it takes a lot of effort to detect and fix those issues. - Qualcomm (The big incumbent in this business) is huge: over 30,000 employees. No way you can compete if all you have is about a 1000-engineers in your cellular division. By the way, the only successful cellular maker I'm aware of besides Qualcomm is MediaTek (Taiwan) which: - Concentrates on the low end market. - Ships complete solutions. You can find lots of different phones which are essentially a single MTK design with very few modifications.

ksec 7y ago
>- At the time, Qualcomm was holding most essential patents required for implementing 3G (and probably now 4G). Licensing fees are enormous burden on anyone entering the market. From what I know, you don't need any licensing to design and implement a 3G/4G/ or even 5G Modem. ( Unless you want CDMA Support ) It is the ODM or Phone Manufactures that has to take care of it. Much like you don't need a license to include H.264 decoder, not even to ship it. But you will need to pay if you decide to enable it. >only successful cellular maker I'm aware of besides Qualcomm is MediaTek Mediatek is awesome. By concentrating on low end, something Qualcomm doesn't want to do, they have an economy of scale for both Fabs Capacity, Design and Modem testing. And just a note, Huawei, assuming they will Settle with Qualcomm, and Samsung both have their own Modem Implementation. These two represent close to 40% of market. And if you include Apple down the line, that is roughly 55%. Adding Mediatek, that is close to 70%. And that is excluding BBK and Xiamoi plans to make their own modem, together they represent 15% to 20%. Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly as media likes to paint it.