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Ever since the iPhone launched, it’s used a Qualcomm modem. Even after Apple began fielding its own custom CPU cores, the Cupertino company relied on Qualcomm for its cellular baseband. Intel reportedly wants to change that, and is pushing hard to build a modem solution that would meet Apple’s design targets.
Intel, as we’ve previously covered, is one of the few players left in the 4G modem business at all. While there were a number of companies in the 3G modem business, many of them have dropped out of the race or consolidated their efforts at 4G. Qualcomm controls the overwhelming majority of the market. Intel, meanwhile, has eked out a handful of wins, but not much more than that. Several years ago, Intel decided to keep its modem efforts focused on TSMC and the 28nm node rather than porting their own technology to 14nm and 4G.
This raises the rather interesting question of which solution a hypothetical iPhone 7 might use. Intel’s XMM 7360 is a 28nm chip built at TSMC, but it’s possible that Intel would develop a 14nm solution for Apple if it felt doing so would win the company’s business. Moving cellular baseband to lower process nodes is a very different animal than performing the same work on traditional semiconductors. Analog and RF process nodes require their own implementations and do not gain the same power and performance benefits from smaller nodes as other components within an SoC.
credit : Joel Hruska