Hacker News Reader

Comment by my123 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that Apple still uses Broadcom Wi-Fi + BT chips in most of their product range despite lots of issues with them.

Apple Watch nowadays is using Apple (codenamed Marconi) Wi-Fi + BT chips, hopefully they'll switch all their product lineup to those.

View on HN

>Apple Watch nowadays is using Apple (codenamed Marconi) Wi-Fi + BT chips, hopefully they'll switch all their product lineup to those.

Apple has renewed their WiFI commitment to Broadcom for at least another 3 years. Marking WiFI, or in fact any Wireless Controller is hard, making it that is also a moving target ( Both WiFi 6E/ WiFi 7 and 5G / 3GPP Rel 17 ) is even harder.

But if Apple do intend to make their own WiFi ( Which makes perfect sense from an BOM cost reduction perspective ), please also bring back AirPort Wireless Router.

Are those from Infineon->Intel->Apple modem lineage or is that a different team?

I think the acquisition of the Intel modem group is too recent to have been integrated into the Apple watch

Why would they have not used them before the acquisition?

Apple Watch uses Intel IBIS or Qualcomm cellular modems depending on model (for those with cellular).

Wi-Fi/BT is handled separately by Apple-designed chips for the newer ones.

One of the recent phones (X or 11?) used Intel for part of its builds (as far as I remember you couldn’t tell from serial number). Apple had a lot of problems and swore off the Intel parts, which killed Intel’s wireless business.

I assumed Apple bought the Intel product line for IP, especially after that episode.

the iPhone 7 used the intel wireless chip. it was a major downgrade for me from my iPhone 6 at the time: speeds were lower for data transfers, and reception was less (could be attributed to an antenna change?)

overall, I was very happy to get a phone that didn't use the intel chips.

Apple used Intel modems for many generations - the iPhone 7, X/8, XS, 11. For some generations they used Qualcomm chips in the models for CDMA regions since Intel didn't make a CDMA modem. So you could tell which chip you'd get from the iPhone model number.

Apple ditched Intel due to Intel being at least a year behind on 5G.

These modems were all LTE modems though. They've always used separate Broadcom chips for WiFi/Bluetooth.

> due to Intel being at least a year behind

That's not the only thing Intel is at least a year behind on.

> "For some generations they used Qualcomm chips in the models for CDMA regions since Intel didn't make a CDMA modem."

Yeah. The Qualcomm-equipped international version of the iPhone X notoriously got significantly better LTE speeds compared to the Intel-modem version sold in UK/Europe.

>which killed Intel’s wireless business

I was under the impression that modern laptops ship with intel WiFi cards (I think I saw some Lenovo laptop use it). Do you mean it killed their modems ?

WiFi and cellphones are both wireless, but this discussion is about cellphones.

I'll just leave this old 2012 article link here.

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/12/03/apple-hiring-former-tex...

For Wi-Fi/BT, it's an Apple team separate from modem efforts.

What are the issue with Broadcom chips?

Not sure about OP but the hardest part about getting linux on a macbook is getting wifi to work because there are no FOSS drivers.

Genuinely curious, is it harder than getting Linux working with the proprietary Apple variant of ARM? Or are you talking pre-M1?

The M1 still uses a broadcom wifi chip: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669358, so presumably because it's a newer chip it'll be more difficult.

Sure there are, it's called brcmfmac. If the AsahiLinux team hasn't already got it working, certainly Corellium did a few months ago in their much hyped public demo image.

https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/en/users/drivers/brcm80211

OpenBSD has also added support to their bwfm(4) driver already for 6.9.

Wireless is absolutely not the hardest problem for the M1 Mac, or running on any Mac, for that matter.

Broadcom Wi-Fi languished for something around a decade under the "b43" driver before Broadcom showed up with their brcmfmac driver, it caused significant anger within the kernel community that they decided to write a new driver instead of just augmenting the existing one

They have various product families and more than 2 drivers.

I need the bcmwl driver (dkms) for some 4-5 year old HP laptop and it has severe problems with some APs and slight problems with others. Overall it's just bad.

Debugging it showed that it's only a thin Linux wrapper around some huge binary blob they use. So not really FOSS, but of course that's what we are used to with firmware. This was't really firmware, they use the blob on the CPU IIRC. (It's been years I debugged this, since then Broadcom is just something that raises a red flag to me.)

Usually it's missing firmware rather than drivers.

Broadcom chips aren't very well regarded in PC Gaming or Server enthusiast markets either, they're a step above Realtek. Oddly Intel is well regarded though...

It mostly comes down to drivers from what I understand but I'm not entirely familiar with all the objections.

I would much rather have a realtek or intel controller than a broadcom one. My thinkpad has a realtek, my last laptop (an xps13) had an intel controller, and they just worked without issue.

Admittedly it's been a while since I had a broadcom controller, but I had all sorts of problems with it. Random disconnects etc.

Realteks also have documentation and thus open-source drivers, which was for a very long time (and very much still is) a problem with Broadcom's notorious closedness.

In my experience, Intel has higher performance and more features (which might be a downside from the point of complexity and configuration) at a higher cost, while Realtek is slower, but cheap, simple and reliable.

I long ago realized that just buying an Intel wifi card and replacing whatever crap my laptop ships with is totally worth it. (At least many 15" laptops ship with replaceable cards, don't know about smaller ones).

> Broadcom chips aren't very well regarded in PC Gaming or Server enthusiast markets either

I always thought that it was funny that their NICs are much to be desired yet their ASICs power a wide variety of enterprise network switches capable of moving terabits of traffic at low latency.

https://people.ucsc.edu/~warner/buffer.html

If people keep buying their crap then why would they be motivated to fix it?

Broadcom has been through so many mergers and acquisitions that I doubt the two product lines have much DNA in common.

Even Broadcom's wired NICs have different generations that came from different acquisitions: Tigon3 (tg3) came from Alteon AceNIC, I forgot where NetExtreme 2 (bnx2) came from, and NetExteme E (bnxt) is an in-house effort that is somewhat derived from the StrataXGS switches.

So yeah, Broadcom is a rollup of two dozen different companies so the quality of one product tells you nothing about others.

You can't compare these two markets. Whether or not these chips work well comes down to firmware and drivers, and every customer gets their own custom datasheet, firmware, and driver. If you hack that into something good, your product will be good. (You're going to need to fix a lot of code and of course have a lot of meetings. Worth it if you're selling a million units, I suppose.) If you just buy some chips off the back of a truck in Shenzhen, solder them onto some circuit board you built in your garage, and use the three-years-out-of-date reference drivers written in a day by some random intern, the results will not be as good. Apple, I assume, uses the first approach when working with hardware vendors. The WiFi card you got for $3 on Amazon probably doesn't.

Don't take this as an endorsement of Broadcom or anything.

> Don't take this as an endorsement of Broadcom or anything.

Shitty firmware and garbage reference drivers sounds like endorsement enough.

Dell is also following the first route and they shipped a PC(alienware) with shitty broadcom drivers(that was a 4yrs ago). I have avoided broadcom ever since..

And yet “the wifi is shit” isn’t something you hear said very often about MacBooks.

I dont think Broadcom's WiFI are inherently bad. If I have to argue ALL WiFi are bad.

The only reason why Realtek dominates is because they are the cheaper alternative. The only reason why Intel dominate WiFI on PC is because they are bundled as part of their CPU sales for Laptop.

Most of the half decent WiFI AP still uses Broadcom. Although increasingly Qualcomm is making inroad. So Boradcom is stuck in the middle of no where in consumer market. They dont have WiFi in PC Laptops, nor do they have WiFi in Android Smartphone. Apple being the largest Broadcom customer for their consumer grade WiFI. And that is why every 2-3 years you may have read Broadcom's intentional leaks about they want to sell their WiFi chipset division because they dont want to play balls with Apple's WiFi asking price.

One year ago:

Broadcom bluetooth/wifi chips ran out of firmware hot patch ram slots long time ago. Company seems to be too cheap to respin the rom mask with all the fixes baked in. From what I remember even brand new iphone x ships with no room for BT firmware patching.

RECON 2019 - Reversing and Exploiting Broadcom Bluetooth (Jiska Classen, Dennis Mantz) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Mi8_9ABCc

35C3 - Dissecting Broadcom Bluetooth (Jiska Classen, Dennis Mantz) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_nI9ok7iQg

Would you have a link or article discussing this Marconi project? I’m always interested in Apple’s wireless chips designs.

A web search brings me back to this thread.

https://gist.github.com/woachk/943828f37c14563a607a26116435b... includes some tiny tidbits on it. The firmware can be extracted out of an IPSW/OTA download, where it is present in the Firmware directory.

Great thanks I'll check it out

Marconi is named after inventor of the radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Marconi?wprov=sfla1

I know it's not pronounced like that in Italian, but I always read his name as "Googly-Elmo" Marconi.

Wow. I can't unsee that.

That just wrecked my ability to say the name of a prominent 15th century Italian dance master.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guglielmo_Ebreo_da_Pesaro

I've always been more of a Caroso fan, especially his second treatise. I've even learned Alegrezza d'amore from both his first and second works and did them back to back :)

Then again, Petit Riens is my favorite danes of Pesaro's... I call it mosh pit riens given how rowdy it can be!

Yeah, but "Fabritio" can't measure up to "Googly-Elmo"!

Fabric Cheeto? Febreze Cheeto?

BTW Allegrezza d'Amore is also in Santucci. Happy to send you a translation.

That'd be awesome!

My email is https://pastebin.com/nRRad00N

To be fair the pronunciation of GLI in Italian is rather unique, so I’ll take Googly-Elmo!

Inventor? Not so much. He did manage to get a patent on other people's prior art by keeping it in a sealed box, though.

> keeping it in a sealed box

A patent has to disclose the invention in order to be valid. An invention, however, can comprise a new and non-obvious combination of pre-existing components. Most inventions, in fact, comprise new and non-obvious arrangements of familiar components, some of which may be patented by others. If a component is patented by another, that just means the inventor won’t be able to actually build his invention without buying or licensing the component from the other inventor. I’m not familiar with the Marconi case, but that may be the situation.

Apple was a music label before it was a computer company. Before that, a fruit.

Marconi was the name of my kitty. A person at the veterinary clinic called him Macaroni by mistake (she’d read it but not heard it). The vet was rather adamant about making sure she got it right when I was just gonna let it go.

He turned to me to check that my guy was indeed named for the inventor of radio. Yep, that’s how he got his name. I wanted him to have a name with dignity.

Another Apple internal project was dubbed Sagan or Carl Sagan. It was later changed to BHA.[0] The story behind it is amusing. [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_7100 [1] https://www.engadget.com/2014-02-26-when-carl-sagan-sued-app...

My French guy at work, would tell me now that it was actually the French who invented the radio.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com