Not call, Intel – not call: Chipzilla modems in iPhone 7s fall short Apple's iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus come with one of two cellular modems, Qualcomm's MDM9645M modem or Intel's XMM7360 modem, depending upon the associated mobile carrier. In ideal conditions, the two modems perform equally well. But research firm Cellular Insights claims that at the edge of cell coverage areas, where signal …
1) Leverage with Qualcomm for better pricing
2) Intel is eventually going to support CDMA technologies, and Apple will license the modem and build it into their SoC and have control over the baseband
Currently baseband code is controlled by Qualcomm on most phones, and this is what (supposedly, not sure if it has ever been actually proven) allows evil government agencies like the FBI to do stuff like call a phone and have it answer without any indication on the screen so it acts as a bug, and similar mischief. If Apple licenses the modem and writes their own baseband, they can insure that sort of thing is not possible.
Qualcomm is way too cozy with the Feds, so personally I'd be willing to give up a bit of cellular performance to prevent them controlling the baseband in my phone.
The question is whether this reduced performance is a hardware or software flaw. If the latter, then newer versions of iOS can deliver updated modem firmware to address the shortcomings. If the flaw is hardware, well wait til next year's model I guess - or if it is a problem for you buy the unlocked or Sprint/Verizon variants to insure you get the Qualcomm modem.
Well, the leverage isn't going to work if the Intel chips are rubbish. Qualcomm may put their prices up!
Intel are not going to support CDMA (actually you mean CDMA2000. CDMA was the original 2G digital cellular standard in the US that lost out globally to GSM). Or, they'd be mad to do so. It's a yesteryear standard, it's only 3ishG, and it's not used anywhere other than the USA these days. So at best it's a limited market and a declining one at that. It's hard to justify the investment.
The poor sensitivity may be a firmware inadequacy, but it's far more likely to be a poor quality RF front end. To make a modem all Intel have to do is implement the DSP as outlined in the standard and bolt on on a front end. There's not much room to tamper with the DSP, so the inadequacy is more likely to be in low-spec analogue components in the RF front end.
It does raise the question as to whether Apple ever bothered to do any qualification testing on their prototypes. This kind of under performance would stick out like a sore thumb in even the most trivial of bench tests, and you'd like to think that they’d reject it if it. Seems like they've just stuck down the Intel part, done a quick functional test and shipped it. Sloppy. Or just arrogant-don't-care.
CDMA is also used in China - the largest carrier in the world uses TD-SCDMA, alongside TD-LTE. Yes, those CDMA2000 standards are "only" 3G and therefore are technically outdated, but it will be many years before those are replaced in the US and China. Heck, we still have plenty of 2G in rural areas and it will be years before phones are able to remove support for that, let alone 3G.
Intel will justify the investment if Apple says "if you add this, we'll license 200 million a year instead of 20 million".
"It does raise the question as to whether Apple ever bothered to do any qualification testing on their prototypes. "
Antennagate does suggest that Apple doesn't do extensive weak signal testing on mobile bands, or it would have been picked up prior to production.
I believe Apple *do* test their products RF performance - certainly there have been photos of Apple's RF testing rooms. However, perhaps they decided that the Intel product was good enough? 20% worse bandwidth isn't *that* big a deal. I mean, I care about bandwidth, sure, but I care about a 90% drop or maybe a 50% drop in performance. Given the vast range of circumstances where I use my phone, and the vast range of different speeds (from GPRS up to 4G), a 20% change is pretty much in the noise.
Well that's bad, but -108db is pretty much at the edge of a cell - where you'd see only one bar. It would be more interesting if there were more data points, like how does the iPhone 4 compare when "being held wrong". How about a few representation Android phones using Qualcomm's modem, as well as one of the non-US Samsungs using Samsung's modem.
A 75% drop is only 6 db. There's a larger variation than that just from the angle the phone is versus the direction of the tower. In the real world the phone is being held, facing a random direction (you don't always orient yourself towards the tower, do you?) and there is multipath if there are any hills or buildings about. Testing performance in a lab is one thing, but the Intel modem could be significant better than or significantly worse than Qualcomm's under multipath or other less than ideal conditions.
In sum, there's a lot of data missing from this to conclude that the Intel modem is something terrible and to be avoided. Personally I'd avoid it just because I figure my phone may have better resale value if it can be used on Verizon & Sprint's 3G networks versus one that cannot.
Act as a bug?
How, pray tell, does the modem get an audio signal from the microphone array without the cooperation of the CPU?
Remember that the modem is just a peripheral. It's not connected to the microphone array, it merely streams the data that the CPU makes available.
> The question is whether this reduced performance is a hardware or software flaw.
My guess is that it is neither - instead it is a "patent licensing flaw". QC have a huge bank of patents in this area and Intel would need to licence a large chunk of them to produce an equally performing product.
Apple is following similar engineering practices to its competitors. It second sources components[1] and tries to ensure that customers get performance that's as good as can be for the market where the phones are sold. It (quite rightly) doesn't take a decision to build some unobtanium chipset that would be custom fabricated just for Apple because that would be stupid. It goes to two vendors each of them well respected for the designs they churn out. One vendor produces a modem that performs (slightly) better than another.
And a bunch of people start to see conspiracies in this?
From any other manufacturer these design decisions would not attract adverse comment, yet because Apple is involved there's <insert hysterical overblown conspiracy theory here> to be a-feared of?
[1] A basic and rather essential manufacturing engineering decision.
This is just an article about Apple using less than premium bits in their expensive handsets.
If you've got problems with a comment it's best to reply to that comment, otherwise it looks like your responding to the article and claiming it contains conspiracy theories.
As an aside, it seems like more and more people are posting on this site without a basic understanding of it's culture. It has a healthy disdain for all technology companies. If you can't take criticism of Apple, or Google, or MS or Ubuntu or Oracle or whoever, you're in the wrong place.
"As an aside, it seems like more and more people are posting on this site without a basic understanding of it's culture. "
s/it\'s/its/
BTW, if you had been bothered to check you would have seen that my posting history here goes back to 2009. I think I've got the hang of "the culture" by now.
" If you can't take criticism of Apple, or Google, or MS or Ubuntu or Oracle or whoever, you're in the wrong place."
Oh if only you were right. Dare to post a criticism of Google/Android here and one's post will be downvoted hundreds of times by dweebs who can't be bothered to engage in a discussion.
I'm happy to take criticism of any business, the tech I own is varied and covers most of the major manufacturers and I know it all has faults. However ranting about conspiracy theories is self-defeating. It just makes the ranter look like a grade-A net loon.
Anyway, thanks for the passive-aggressive nuzzling. It was like real, man.
...Apple has no problem. Given that this was measured in a lab, I'm guessing that people probably won't actually notice in practice. It's not uncommon for one person to have a signal while another phone does not.
All these articles (I really hope you are sponsored for them), but don't think people will forget that Samsung phones caught fire... and maybe that's why you should avoid cheap hardware components.
Oooh, can I have a go?
I guess that it's actually a significant problem as soon as you move outside of major conurbations and will lead to a crash in Apple share price! And don't forget that MS push mandatory telemetry updates to all Win 10 users!
Anyone else want to make some shit up? A random opinion on the article plus a straw man seems to be the required format.
"Apple's dual sourcing strategy reflects a desire to avoid having to waste space or money by having a large, expensive component so jammed with circuits that it will work with any telecom infrastructure"
Since all the iPhone 7 devices are the same form factor, and both chips have to fit on the same board without sacrificing any other features, I'm sure it just came down to money and not size. (which apparently doesn't matter so much after all) Intel must have significantly undercut Qualcomm on this, or offered some other hidden subsidy with their other chips, such as CPUs for Macs. I wonder if the performance was really tested by Apple or if they just took someone's word for it? Or if anyone cared..
Apple will have specified the performance parameters when they went to the the suppliers. If they did, and the products are within those, then there's no problem. If they didn't, or they aren't, then there's a problem. I can't see Apple making such elementary mistakes, but stranger things have happened.
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