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Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

I would bet quite a bit of money they didn't forget, based on the people I've known on the team. That's just Samsung's modem not being as good as Qualcomm. Choosing Qualcomm would have led to a very different phone where the feature differentiation they were trying to deliver with Tensor simply wouldn't have been possible. There are serious consequences to the middle ground solutions as well.

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> Choosing Qualcomm would have led to a very different phone where the feature differentiation they were trying to deliver with Tensor simply wouldn't have been possible.

Would you mind elaborating on this point?

IIRC Qualcomm puts their own Hexagon DSP on the SoC which is where they placed their own low precision matrix multiplication accelerator.

Apple uses their own SoC with a Qualcomm modem so I don't see why Google couldn't do the same. It would probably cost more than Snapdragon though.

That's the dangerous middle ground I mentioned.

Google doesn't have nearly the same leverage and volume numbers to use against Qualcomm as Apple does, but even for Apple it's a devil's bargain. The licensing terms are incredibly onerous. If they updated them and you didn't agree, they used to just cut off your entire company's chip supply until that was ruled monopolistic and illegal. The royalties (one of the only royalties Apple actually pays) are substantial percentages of the final device price. Getting into bed with Qualcomm needs to be weighed against the risk to the rest of your business.

As a consumer, I buy Qualcomm modem phones, but as an engineer Qualcomm is only marginally below the plague on my avoidance list.

Apple also bought Intel's modem unit as either leverage or an escape hatch from Qualcomm. It's like having unlimited dollars to throw at a problem is useful.

No doubt, though it would be useful if they could actually deliver a working modem that they will ship in their phones.

Has Qualcomm ever engaged in significant semi-custom work? (no, adjusting dvfs for a special "for galaxy" SKU or adding pluton to 8cX gen 3 doesn't count). Samsung was a semi-custom partner for Apple in the early days of the iPhone (to the extent that the M1 still has some Samsung IP in it[0]).

I heavily doubt that Qualcomm is even capable of working in such a role. In fact, the C-suite probably believes that their core competency is lawsuits and not modems, anyway.

[0] https://twitter.com/calebccff/status/1472517091970494465

(Edit: I meant semi-custom SoC design/architecture not cores, like https://www.anandtech.com/show/7281/understanding-amd-semi-c... )

Has Qualcomm ever engaged in significant semi-custom work?

Yes, the early generations of Snapdragon SoCs were built using a custom ARMv7 core called Scorpion, which was later succeeded by another v7 core called Krait. The first ARMv8 SoC (the infamously disastrous Snapdragon 810) used stock ARM cores, but the next generation (820) switched to an in-house v8 design called Kryo. Around that time though, the company did massive layoffs, including in silicon engineering, leading to all the subsequent designs using tweaked ARM cores (despite also being called Kryo)

I mean helping others execute semi-custom work based partly on qualcomm designs, to clarify

> I heavily doubt that Qualcomm is even capable of working in such a role. In fact, the C-suite probably believes that their core competency is lawsuits and not modems, anyway.

It's not 1 of capability. They're trying to force everyone to use the full SoC and not just the modem.

Totally fair take. As a consumer I have a tendency to forget it's a game of trade-off, but I don't think that it's worth it, which is why I returned the phone, but I hope my opinion won't match everyone's and a lot of people will be happy with the device.

It's just a shame, even now I find myself eyeing the black Friday sales prices. I loved everything else about the phone, but I know that the battery life is going to drive me mad and with all the heat and increased number of charge cycles there's just no way the battery is going to last as long as the support does and that's a deal breaker for me.

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