I may have jumped the gun on when Intel will be able to entirely replace Qualcomm.
BARCELONA—When I’m wrong, I try to admit it. Last week we reported on an Intel press release for a new modem which might, in theory, kick Qualcomm’s part out of iPhones. The XMM7560, the press release said, would move into production this year.
But today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Intel reps at the modem section of the company booth said that while the 7560 is a great part, it won’t appear in retail products until 2018. So it probably won’t be eligible for this year’s iPhone. If Intel’s going to make a play for all of that Apple business, they’ll have to wait another year.
The key is that the 7560 is Intel’s first modem with CDMA, the radio needed to support Verizon’s and Sprint’s networks. The model coming this year, the XMM7480, does not support CDMA, so it can’t be placed in Verizon or Sprint devices for the time being. It will speed Intel-powered iPhones up, though, as it supports 4x carrier aggregation and 256QAM, features which weren’t on the Intel modem in this year’s round of iPhone 7 units. Intel reps said the 7480 is still on schedule to appear in devices this year.
Intel’s modems don’t perform as well as Qualcomm’s, according to testing from Cellular Insights. But Apple is outraged over Qualcomm’s licensing fees, which are charged to manufacturers and set based on the retail price of the phone, and the phone maker is suing the chip maker for $1 billion. So this year, Apple switched its AT&T, T-Mobile, and European iPhone models over to Intel.
That bifurcation is likely to continue for another year, then, with some iPhones running Qualcomm chips and some running Intel chips. Apple also probably won’t use Qualcomm’s latest gigabit LTE modems, to prevent the Qualcomm phones from outstripping the Intel ones too far on performance. (Qualcomm’s current modem, the X16, is comparable to the Intel 7560.)
Neither Qualcomm nor Intel talk publicly about their Apple business, of course.