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Comment by kev009 | Hacker News Reader

Qualcomm's RF design is best in class. This is their bread and butter and they have been consistently good at it forever.

Apple purchased intel's RF baseband division,which was awful, and has been working on it in secret for years. It remains to be seen how this will go for Apple. It is attractive to Apple for cost and efficiency reasons (theoretically they can bury this all on a single SoC if they wish to) not because Qualcomm is bad.

It bears in mind that just because you are good at one thing does not imply you will be good at another. For instance, Intel's networking is mediocre to bad depending on the product or various entities trying to produce MIPS and ARM products failing time and time again.

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How quickly we forget Huawei... QC's fine, but I think the huawei situation shows that QC has probably been getting a little fat/lazy on the modem side for a few years too. Only a real competitor could prove that if true, 2013 intel looked like they were best in class too but the rot was already firmly entrenched.

So, I wouldn't say intel's modems were awful, maybe not as good as the QC's of the time, but it could just have been immature, and underfunded. Apple OTOH, is famous for taking somewhat failed teams and having a long enough vision to create great products. They seem to understand that 9 women can't create a baby in 1 month and are willing to keep iterating until its right if it solves a problem for them.

> Apple … has been working on it in secret for years.

I keep hoping Apple will release a MacBook with a 5G chipset. The rumors are saying their in house one will ready in 2026 at the earliest. It sure seems like a long road given they bought the intel RF division in 2019.

My understanding is that Intel's chips weren't great and making power efficient 5g chips is wildly difficult. Thus ends my understanding of these issues, though.

And Qualcomm patents. I just don't see how you can patent anything related to complying with a radio spec, there has to be limited ways to comply

> Intel's networking is mediocre to bad depending on the product

That's an interesting statement, as their Wi-Fi cards are some of the best on the market and common laptop-purchasing wisdom says to buy anything with an Intel Wi-Fi adapter and avoid everything else.

I was talking more about wireline networking there, which are all rife with silicon errata and fairly shoddy drivers (which is sadly the norm in the industry). Most of the damage is mitigated in i.e. upstream Linux but it's not pretty and if you are doing datacenter networking you are much better off with Mellanox(nvidia) or Chelsio (a small but mighty player with interesting capabilities) who have good chips and good drivers.

On the 802.11 wireless front, intel maintains a marked advantage in having inbox drivers in Linux by the time you need them. I would take an ath11k/ath12k over equivalent Intel parts but Qualcomm's driver upstreaming process takes way too long while Intel tends to integrate before the products are generally available.

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