Apple dropping Intel as radio chip supplier, killing off the product – report | Hacker News Reader

Apple dropping Intel as radio chip supplier, killing off the product – report

9to5mac.com

76 pointswalterbell22 comments

Apple really used Intel well. They used them to squeeze a better deal from QC then pitted them against each other if frivolous lawsuits to get even better terms and then dumped Intel after using and abusing it. The only thing left for Intel is to the walk of shame.

The writing is on the wall. Apple will use an in-house developed solution to cut out and integrate another chip into their A-series processors. Just like they did with their GPU from imagination technology last year...

Well, this sucks for Germany. Intel's GSM radio division is formerly Infineon, AFAIK still located in Germany. There wasn't much state of the art microelectronics left in Germany anyway (correct me?).

According to rumors, Intel isn't killing the whole radio division; those engineers will just work on the next generation radio chip instead.

https://www.trinamic.com/technology/adv-technologies/

They’re not killing the division, just the first gen 5G radio targeting 2020. The article notes that they’re continuing work on another radio launching in the timeframe of Apple’s 2022 releases, which they’re hoping to target.

Depends on what you call "State of the art"? Cutting edge logic processes are a domain of Intel, TSMC, Samsung, GF and the incumbents in China.

But for everything else, like IoT, Sensors, Power, you can find plenty of companies and subsidiaries in Germany: Infineon, Bosch, GlobalFoundries, NXP, Dialog, Elmos, Melexis, Xfab, AMS, IDT (ZMDi), TI, Intel, TDK (Micronas) and many smaller ones.

Assuming the design of next gen modem from Intel are done on 10nm, which is highly likely so, it shouldnt be surprise Intel will fail to deliver it on time.

Given Intel had precisely one customer to serve and failed to meet their demand, I highly doubt Intel will win back whatever they loss.

I also doubt Apple "used" Intel, more like given an opportunity to Intel. Which they really need to get into the 4G/5G value chain. I hope Apple has back ported their latest 4G design to 14nm+++.

Things are looking very ugly.

This seems to explain the rumors of Apple supposedly moving Macs away from Intel better than that rumor, which doesn’t really make sense, certainly not on the timescale of 2020. If supply chain orders to Intel declined, it makes much more sense if it was for radio chip orders than CPUs.

When the Intel based modems first launched a couple years ago there were tons of reports of worse performance. Unfortunately, I ended up getting one of those phones -- pretty confident it was worse than the qualcomm based versions. So, it does worry me that Apple will in the process of developing their own solution repeat some of the same mistakes Intel and Qualcomm (probably years ago) made and we will have a couple of years of slightly worse modems in our phones.. so not looking forward to that..

They never had a competitive product. Look at any of the head to head reviews of the QC vs intel radios.

Anecdotally, my intel modem equipped iphone has worse signal performance than any phone i've owned in the past 10 years, pretty much.

So what are the other brands using? It also sounds kind of unlikely Apple would go all-in on their own design without a backup plan.

Any guesses on if this was the proposed "real reason" behind the CEO's recent departure?

This is a fairly small failure by Intel's standards. The 10 nm fiasco is far larger.

Been wondering if this is on purpose. Internally they know 10nm is gonna be the last process step and they need to milk each generation as long as possible/stall until new wondertech.

Intel isn't even following their own roadmaps (even the watered-down PAO). If it was planned, they'd at least make it look less embarrassing.

Intel has gone to shit. I'd be happy to see laptop mfgs stop using their awful wifi radios as well.

The decline has begun. It will soon be time for Intel to shut shop.

I mean, they missed a few trends and are having some scaling issues on their next generation of transistors but they made like $60 billion in revenue last year and the company is worth ~$240 billion. I think they're going to be around for a few more years.

The taller they stand, the harder they fall.

No, actually. In tech, the typical path of a failed giant is slow decline for a while, a few wild gyrations, and finally patent trolling and brand necrophilia.

I am aware AMD has been making great strides lately, but you have to remember that AMD has a decade-long hole to dig themselves out of.

The only game in town has been Intel for almost 12 years now. When the Core lineup was released in 2006 [1], the wind quickly went out of AMD's sails. [2] AMD had almost matched Intel in market share, they just need to keep the innovation coming. The problem was Bulldozer and similar architectures just weren't competitive. Even with double the core count, Intel's chips were simply better for the vast majority of workloads. [3]

The CPU wars had gotten so one-sided that I believe Intel stopped pushing. With the exception of Gulftown [4], four cores was the name of the game from Kentsfield in 2006 [5] until Kaby Lake in 2017 [6]. Intel released it's first desktop dual-core processor on April 16, 2005 [7]. Quad-core Intel chips came January 8, 2007 [8]. Less than two years led to an extra two cores in the consumer level CPU market, and that was the end for over 10 years.

When the Zen architecture was release to consumers on Febuary 28, 2017 [9], Intel checked under the couch and magically found two extra cores. Coffee Lake was released on October 5, 2017 [10]. Funny how real competition changed a decade of stagnation, isn't it? If Zen didn't do as well as it did, I can see the 8th generation chips staying quad-core.

The supercomputer market is also dominated by Intel. I count two (2) supercomputers using Opterons [11]. Everything else is POWER or Xeon. All Apple computers use Intel CPUs.

Ryzen, Threadripper and EPYC are great products and offer a staggering increase in performance over what the previous generation chips. It's far from "game over".

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_2#Models

2: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/market_share.html

3: https://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/10/11/amd_bulldozer_fx8...

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_micropro...

5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentsfield_(microprocessor)

6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake

7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_D#Smithfield

8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentsfield_(microprocessor)

9: https://www.mobipicker.com/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-1700x-1700-rele...

10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Lake 11: https://www.top500.org/list/2018/06/

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