Apple announced on Thursday that it has signed an agreement to acquire the majority of Intel’s smartphone modem business. The deal is worth $1 billion and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year. Included in the buyout are 2,200 Intel employees joining Apple, patents and other IP, equipment and leases.
Apple could do without Qualcomm’s wireless modems in iPhones as soon as 2022, a reliable analyst has it.
In an in-depth report detailing Intel’s modem struggles, The Information claims Apple is not expected to finalize its own in-house designed cellular modem for iPhones before 2025.
Apple’s reportedly been actively hiring silicon engineers in San Diego, where it operates an office with a growing Wireless Architecture team, to work on a custom cellular modem for future iPhones.
Offering improvements in power, size and scalability, Intel’s new 5G-enabled modem supports theoretical peak speeds of up to 6 gigabits per second, or three to six times faster than the latest LTE modems available today.
The upcoming 2018 iPhone lineup might only use Intel-based modems. This news comes from Qualcomm, which says its modems won’t be used in this year’s phones.
MediaTek hopes to replace Qualcomm as one of Apple’s modem chip providers for iPhone in the coming years. For now, it will celebrate working on HomePod.
Intel is now making modems that will be used for the 2018 iPhone lineup. The XMM 7560 is the first Intel modem to support both CDMA and GSM.
As its legal battle with Qualcomm rages on, Apple is reportedly actively seeking new chip suppliers to absorb more of the remaining baseband modem orders.
Tensions between Apple and Qualcomm have been on the rise, which has in part caused Apple to look elsewhere for the iPhone’s upcoming 5G modem. Apple is aiming to include 5G in the iPhone by 2019-2020, which means they are getting close to choosing a manufacturer.
Apple is designing its future iPhones and iPads in order to end reliance on Qualcomm components.
Qualcomm and Apple are currently embroiled in a legal spat involving excessive royalties, casting serious doubt on the possibility of a Qualcomm-made LTE modem in a future iPhone. Today, Qualcomm teased a brand new Snapdragon X20 LTE chip, its second-gen Gigabit LTE modem.
It’s capable of fiber-like LTE Category 18 downloads of up to 1.2 gigabits per second, or one-fifth faster than the previous X16 chip. Upload speeds go up to a theoretical maximum of 150 megabits per second. It’s expected to ship in the first half of 2018.
Only time will tell if Apple plans on dual-sourcing cellular modems from both Qualcomm and Intel, in which case 2018 iPhones could theoretically support faster-than-Gigabit-LTE downlink speeds of up to 150 megabytes per second.
