
Intel Exiting 5G Modems - ItsTotallyOn
https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-modem-statement/#gs.639at4
======
metildaa
Intel couldn't make WiMax work right (too power hungry and low speed), their
attempts to build an LTE chip have fared worse than Samsung and Qualcomm, to
the point that they are a full 5 years behind their competitors, and their
cable modem chipsets (Puma 6/7, used in the Xfinity converged gateway) are
fatally flawed and DoSable with a few Kbps of traffic, while having horrible
bufferbloat.

At this point I think Intel's entire advantage over the past two decades was
being on the bleeding edge of silicon processes, paired with a middling
silicon design team and good firmware devs that could patch most flaws in
microcode.

The process lead has disappeared, and when working with RF frontends (LTE,
WiMax, cable modems, WiFi) their ability to cover up implementation errors in
the driver is limited.

Intel's prospects for the next few years look dim in this context, given the
tens of billions wasted on the aformentioned forays into making radio chipsets
and the declining revenue of their legacy CPU market paired with serious
manufacuting constraints that have hamstrung their supply chain.

~~~
bgorman
To me this is kind of strange, I thought Intel had a good reputation as far as
Ethernet and Wireless drivers were concerned. Certainly much better than (old)
Broadcom, Realtek, Ralink, ST and the like.

~~~
WeakLanguage
On Ethernet, Intel is known for their little frills, stable line of NICs. That
said, they have not been a leader since the jump to 10Gbps. Their 10Gbps line
eventually came along and is solid, but it was a few years behind everyone
else. That same story seems to be repeating itself at every new ethernet
standard over the past decade.

Come to think of it, the last decade has been really bad for Intel. They no
longer have a node advantage. They no longer have a performance advantage in
any market space that I can think of outside of frequency hungry low-thread
applications (games).

Their WiFi chips are good, but second tier. Their Modem chips are third tier.
Their node is mostly on par with the competition, for now. Their CPUs are
trading blows with AMD. Their ethernet chips are a generation behind. Optane
is is a bright spot, but we'll see how they squander that.

The next big diversification play by Intel is GPUs, I have no idea how that
will pan out.

~~~
metildaa
Optane will be squandered by limited CPU support and slim software support :c

Optane is a neat idea, but the severe change in software architecture combined
with only select CPUs even supporting it will limit uptake outside FAANGs or
organizations with really specialized needs.

~~~
Tostino
Databases will love Optane. There have been companies showing how much they
are willing to spend on database hardware and software for ages. I'm not sure
that will change any time soon.

~~~
dman
Not so sure about this. World is increasingly moving to distributed scale out
databases. Once you go that way consensus algorithms and rpc costs dwarf disk
io speed.

~~~
magila
Not everyone is building apps which need to be "web scale". Optane has the
potential to significantly raise the performance ceiling of a single-master
database. I bet there are a lot of companies who will happily drop six figures
on Optane systems if it saves them the complexity of managing a distributed
database.

~~~
lmm
The niche where your present requirements are big enough to benefit from
Optane and your future requirements are small enough to not need to go
distributed is pretty narrow.

~~~
dogma1138
Finance, healthcare, and enterprise systems.

I'm not sure it's really a niche.

~~~
lmm
I've worked for a company that was willing to spend that kind of money on
monolithic database servers. They were a top-100 website though, and this was
the best part of a decade ago (and thus e.g. in the pre-SSD era).

They were also scrambling to move all their services away from use of that
database in favour of a horizontally scaled system that could grow further.

The query rate that can be handled by a single conventional server are pretty
monstrous these days. You'd have to be simultaneously a) maybe top-50 website
level load (I'm well aware that there's a lot more than websites out there,
but at the same time there really aren't _that_ many organizations working at
that scale, much as there are many that think they are) and b) confident that
you weren't going to grow much.

~~~
dogma1138
The real world is much bigger than websites/apps.

~~~
lmm
It is, and I acknowledged that. But it gives a sense of the scale involved.
Just as there are very few websites/apps that need to handle, what, 2000
requests/second (and simultaneously don't intend growing by more than a factor
of two or so), systems that need that kind of performance in any other field
are similarly rare.

~~~
dogma1138
Not really, it’s also not necessarily not needing to grow but not everything
can scale in the same manner as Netflix or Facebook.

Financial systems especially trading platforms need to ensure market fairness
they also need to have at the end a single database as you can’t have any
conflicts in your orders and the orders need to be executed in the order they
came in across the entire system not just a single instance.

This means that even when they do end up with some micro-service-esque
architecture for the front end it still talks to a single monolithic database
cluster in the end which is used to record and orchestrate everything.

~~~
lmm
That is indeed one case where a large single-node database makes a certain
amount of sense (though it's not the only solution; you need a globally
consistent answer for which orders match with which, but that doesn't have to
mean a single database node. Looking at the transaction numbers I'd assume
that e.g. the busiest books on NYSE must be multi-node systems just because of
the transaction rates). But fundamentally there are what, 11 equity exchanges
in the US total (and less than half of those are high-volume). And the market
fairness requirements are very specific to one particular kind of finance;
they're not something that would be needed in healthcare, general enterprise,
or most financial applications. Like I said, niche.

------
hyperrail
Another commenter (metildaa) said Intel is 5 years behind the competition on
their 4G LTE technology.

I can't reconcile that claim with PC Magazine's tests of the iPhone XS's
mobile performance: [https://www.pcmag.com/news/364116/iphone-xs-crushes-x-in-
lte...](https://www.pcmag.com/news/364116/iphone-xs-crushes-x-in-lte-speeds-
but-still-falls-short-of)

The PC Mag author, Sascha Segan, says repeatedly that the iPhone XS at worst
only slightly trails the Galaxy Note 9 and other high-end phones with 2018
Qualcomm SoCs. To quote directly:

> Between the three 4x4 MIMO phones, you can see that in good signal
> conditions, the Qualcomm-powered Galaxy Note 9 and Google Pixel 2 still do a
> bit better than the iPhone XS Max. But as signal gets weaker, the XS Max
> really competes, showing that it's well tuned.

> Let's zoom in on very weak signal results. At signal levels below -120dBm
> (where all phones flicker between zero and one bar of reception) the XS Max
> is competitive with the Qualcomm phones and far superior to the iPhone X,
> although the Qualcomm phones can eke out a little bit more from very weak
> signals.

We could say this is all Apple tuning the phone's antenna array and materials,
but I find it extremely unlikely that would have compensated for "5 years" of
Intel lag - back then LTE was _several_ times slower in theory and practice.

We could also say this is just Apple giving Intel all the secrets of modems
that Intel couldn't figure out themselves. That could be more plausible, but
again I'm doubtful, since Apple would have little incentive to hoard those
secrets and then loan them to Intel instead of using them to build their own
chips. Unless of course Apple stole those secrets from Qualcomm or someone
else...?

~~~
craftyguy
> Another commenter (metildaa) said Intel was 5 years behind the competition
> on their 4G LTE technology.

Why didn't you just reply to their comment?

~~~
hyperrail
They made the same claim in 2 separate comment threads and I was unsure which
to reply to.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678579)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678578](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19678578)

~~~
codinghorror
Ah, the many headed hydra joy of threaded discussions, chop off one head and
four more appear!

------
bgorman
It is really amazing how much money Intel has thrown away chasing "mobile"
dollars. First, they squandered billions trying to make mobile Socs, now the
last part of the company that can get inside a cell phone is throwing in the
towel as well. While Intel was doing all of this, it managed to squander away
its core manufacturing competency as well. I have a feeling Intel will be the
next HP, sliced and diced for parts - none of which resemble the company at
its best.

~~~
cdumler
I think the problem is that they believe they "squandered" supplying the
iPhone CPU. They stated that mobile CPUs would never sell in quantity, so they
weren't interested. Missing that boat, they've believed the need to be in
front of mobile at any cost.

I think Intel failed to realize that they had made the right call with iPhone:
their very culture isn't about being innovative, but providing microcode
flexibility at high instructions/watt. They had a chance to define servers,
and still do. They should have been all over the whole spectre/meltdown/timing
security issues and owned creating a secure server chip. Instead, they've
fretted away so many options that they never had a chance to win.

My two cents.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Intel owned a big slice of the embedded ecosystem well into the 90's. They
threw that all away to focus on high margin Pentiums.

~~~
agumonkey
it seems like a regular business error ..

------
morpheuskafka
I'm wondering if Apple decided to settle with Qualcomm, and Intel scuttled a
presumably low-selling business, or did Intel abruptly close the business
prompting Apple to suddenly settle?

Given that the settlement came in the middle of court arguments unbeknownst to
the lawyers, I'm thinking the latter.

~~~
metildaa
Apple was Intel's only LTE modem client, Apple did everything they could for
years to give Intel the secrets that made Qualcomm's modems so performant, yet
Intel was still a half decade behind in modem sensitivity, leaving a huge gap
betwewn Intel and Qualcomm/Samsung.

------
ndesaulniers
Surely in regards to the current top post on HN:
[https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/04/qualcomm-and-apple-
ag...](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/04/qualcomm-and-apple-agree-to-
drop-all-litigation/)

~~~
lucasmullens
Could you explain how that's related?

~~~
wmf
Apple currently buys 4G modems from Intel and presumably Apple is shopping for
5G modems. If Intel no longer makes 5G modems then Apple needs to buy them
from Qualcomm. Or it could be the reverse: if Apple has decided to buy 5G
modems from Qualcomm then Intel has no customers for its 5G modems and thus
decided to cancel them.

~~~
baybal2
It is not like Qualcomm settles with Apple to get into Apple's cellphones, it
is a concession made to make them _drop_ Intel and still pay them royalties
after Apple finishes its own modem.

Apple been poaching Qualcomm's top radio engineers for years ...for work in
their Chinese RnD centre (no non-compete enforcement there)

~~~
ptlu
Non-competes are not enforced in California.

~~~
baybal2
Well, they might be other reasons then. You don't normally haul a poached top
tier employee from a first world country to China.

My speculation is maybe their talks with Huawei were more fruitful than known
to the public.

~~~
mises
Wouldn't it be suicide for a pro-privacy company to put Huawei gear in it's
phones? Normally I would figure consumers just aren't that privacy-conscious,
but with the current national security climate around Huawei, I think many
more people are aware of the massive risks they pose.

~~~
baybal2
To begin with, work on physical layer of 5G NR is to big extend Huawei's and
ZTE's effort as part of 3gpp

Who will be your first option for supplier of 5G PHY chips other than
standard's original authors?

~~~
mises
Qualcomm, I suppose. I personally think it's more likely that Apple wants to
make its own. One thing it does do well is custom fabrication and
optimization, which is why iPhones run better with less RAM than Androids and
can have good battery life. I think they may be sick of the trouble caused by
3rd-party suppliers in this department.

------
gjsman-1000
Early this morning: Apple and Qualcomm abandon lawsuits. Late this evening:
Intel announces leaving modem business.

Coincidence? I think not!

~~~
craftyguy
It's a coincidence unless you have any information to prove otherwise.

Edit: apparently the very wise HN users would rather downvote a call for
evidence and upvote a feels goods conspiracy theory. stay classy HN.

~~~
alteria
Fastest way to get downvotes is to complain about them

~~~
rohan1024
This is of topic. How do you downvote a comment? Is it disabled for new users
or user should have specific karma?

I have been here for years and I have decent karma I think

~~~
alteria
Based on this post [1] you need 500 karma

[1}
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8381148](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8381148)

------
TorKlingberg
The cellular modem market has absolutely crashed in the last decade. Broadcom,
ST-Ericsson, Nvidia and Intel have all left the market. I may be forgetting
someone.

That leaves basically just Qualcomm and Mediatek (on the lower end) left.
Huawei and Samsung have something too. Apple and Samsung will have to make
their own modems now, if they don't want to be dependent on Qualcomm.

This is certainly not good for competition.

~~~
dade_
Sony?
[https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201601/16-008E/inde...](https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Press/201601/16-008E/index.html)

------
frou_dh
Some vindication for the oft-maligned SemiAccurate site.

Article five months ago: [https://semiaccurate.com/2018/11/12/intel-tries-to-
pretend-t...](https://semiaccurate.com/2018/11/12/intel-tries-to-pretend-they-
have-5g-silicon-with-the-xmm-8160/)

~~~
TheOperator
More like "veryaccurate" am i right?

------
dman
Big companies dont fail due to external forces, they fail because of internal
dynamics. Everything apart from x86 is a hobby at Intel. Also think they are
addicted to high margins and expect that a substantial portion of cost of a
device goes to Intel components.

------
NotPaidToPost
Cellular technology is hard and complex.

I remember Broadcom thought "no problem, we churned out Wifi solution with 50
people so how hard can this cellular thing be for us?"... Well, they crashed
and burned.

You need massive teams of people who know what they are doing to build
cellular chipsets with the necessary software stack.

------
40acres
Stock is jumping after hours, not surprised as modems really aren't a core
competency of Intel.

------
Abishek_Muthian
Good for iPhone users, now that Apple & Qualcomm are in the bed again; they
will get decent 5G experience (or) at-least what everyone else is getting.

~~~
londons_explore
It's probably too late for this year's iPhone though, unless engineering teams
have been working behind closed doors of both companies expecting this to be
the case.

~~~
dwaite
I very much doubt 5G iPhones were ever something we would see in 2019. The
network deployments aren’t there yet, and Apple won’t have two SKUs for their
flagship 2019 model to hedge their bets with 1st gen modems like other
manufacturers.

------
wtmt
Next year Intel will be hit harder when Apple announces Macs based on its A
series ARM chips and transitions its entire Mac line to it by 2023 or 2024.
This move by Apple will also prompt other PC manufacturers (a lot more than
before) to move to ARM if Microsoft continues to play along well on ARM.

Seems like Intel’s future is bleak, and the company may have to be broken into
pieces.

~~~
gscott
Apple switching to Arm would be near impossible given many people run windows
on apple and other non-apple programs that won't be able to be emulated fast
enough on Arm. Steve Jobs might try that leap but Tim Cook won't want to scare
anyone off from the Apple ecosystem.

~~~
pjmlp
Apple already did that transition multiple times. And running Windows on Apple
hardware is not something that Apple cares about.

~~~
xattt
I am still disappointed that the menu item for Boot Camp to “log off and boot
into Windows” never made it into the OS.

~~~
dwaite
IIRC it was there in betas for a while. Typically when a feature was pulled
from OS X betas it was either because it was too broken to make the release
date, or patents.

------
SomeHacker44
I wonder if the timing of this announcement was determined by the timing of
the Apple/Qualcomm settlement. In particular, if Apple encouraged Intel to
delay this announcement until they reached a settlement with Qualcomm, to get
better terms with Qualcomm.

------
Guereric
I'm disappointed by this news because Intel was the only mobile modem
manufacturer who was competitive (or nearly competitive) to Qualcomm in North
America. Without Samsung, without Chinese OEMs, Qualcomm is unfettered in its
monopoly here.

~~~
londons_explore
Mediatek isn't far behind. If they were to put actual decent CPU's in their
SoC's (which is just a matter of licensing - switching out one ARM CPU for
another isn't too hard), I think they could take a big share of Qualcomm's
market.

------
dtaht99
I keep hoping intel will fix bufferbloat across all their
lte/cablemodem/dsl/etc gear. It would improve their end user experience
enormously. I even know a few folks that would help....

------
jbigelow76
So earlier Apple and Qualcomm reach détente. Then Intel announces exit from
the 5G modem space, meaning Intel isn't a viable alternative to Qualcomm as
supplier had Apple and Qualcomm not made nice. Interesting timing of
statements...

...but, Intel mentioned the IP they still retain in the 5G space. What's the
over/under on Apple licensing Intel's IP and bringing modem dev in house
(keeping in mind that would take a couple years at best to payoff) vs making a
best case scenario of a working relationship with Qualcomm and using their
tech?

~~~
londons_explore
I suspect this is the case.

Apple will have purchased IP and maybe entire teams from Intel.

------
smaslennikov
Surely due to the recently top post on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19674218)

~~~
gboudrias
I thought it was the Qualcomm Apple settlement?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19676499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19676499)

Surely it can't be a coincidence. Though the weather thing might not be
either, but if so this was a very well coordinated response.

------
brooklyntechie1
What a coincidence that intel released this after Apple issued the press
release about Qualcomm. Seems like Intel had some weight lifted up off their
shoulders.

------
jrockway
I like how the forward-looking statement disclosure is longer than the press
release itself.

------
xbmcuser
Well now I get why Apple settled its lawsuits with Qualcomm suddenly or
Qualcomm might have asked for a lot more money interesting how Intel announces
this a day after the Apple and Qualcomm settlement

~~~
mises
I'm sure Apple told Intel to hold the press release or they would sue them for
breach. I can't really blame Apple hear; Qualcomm can be nasty and Apple
wasn't wrong to not give up a huge advantage.

~~~
londons_explore
I doubt Qualcomm was unaware. Lots of rumours spread within an industry but
never make it out onto the internet.

------
for_i_in_range
Does anyone know what they mean by

> "...and Other Data-Centric Opportunities"

What does Data-Centric mean? Specifically, Data-Centric platforms that they
keep referencing?

~~~
liuliu
[https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2017/02/10/intel-c...](https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2017/02/10/intel-
ceo-we-are-a-data-company.html)

Not sure if that is still true after Krzanich out.

------
01100011
Intel should buy Nvidia, drop their internal GPU efforts, and focus on
regaining their CPU lead. It may be a futile effort, with the end of Moore's
law and Dennard scaling making their previous approach less appealing, but
they've got to try. Then again, if they bought Nvidia, they'd probably try to
put an x86 inside the GPU...

~~~
speedplane
> Intel should ... focus on regaining their CPU lead.

I think they are focused on that. They've been trying to bring their 10nm
process to market for years. It's now 3 years past their initial projections.
Moore's exponential curve is certainly dead, the big question now is whether
performance will improve linearly or something worse.

~~~
TomMarius
Performance can still increase exponentially on average. There are still
undeveloped ways of hyper-performant computing, such as chemical, biological
(bacterial), DNA-based, optical, maybe quantum... and of course we would start
replacing silicon with graphene once its production finally takes off, which
should lead to 3D chips. Spintronics is another very interesting field.

~~~
speedplane
> There are still undeveloped ways of hyper-performant computing ...

Agreed, but none of the technologies have reached the marketplace, and it's
entirely unclear how long it will take for them to develop. If it takes
decades, any exponential curve is toast.

~~~
TomMarius
That is not true. You can't claim that. I'm saying that _on average_ it's
going to be exponential - e.g. even if it takes 100 years, the jump will be so
huge it'll be an exponentially large step.

~~~
speedplane
> on average it's going to be exponential - e.g. even if it takes 100 years,
> the jump will be so huge it'll be an exponentially large step

I would not call that an exponential, it's a step function. It's entirely
possible that human innovation over time will be look more like a series of
step functions than a continuous exponential. The problem with step functions,
of course, is that you can't easily predict future growth based on past
growth, as you can with an exponential.

E.g., when quantum computing comes, it will surely be significant, but if it
takes 10, 100, or 1000 years to make a breakthrough, it's not at all clear
that the timing will happen to coincide with the exponential that we have been
on for the last 50 years.

------
doe88
OMG this is huge, I can't fathom how a company with such level of engineering
and talents can't/choose not to do it. At one point it's bigger than the
bottom line or any other considerations, it's for the moral of the whole
company.

~~~
lallysingh
At some point the size of the business becomes it's largest performance
factor. It loses the ability to use talent and to understand which risks to
take.

------
the_70x
obvious movement, intel have been sucking at modem design and performance
compared with its rivals on LTE

------
gonzo
Yet again, INTC + RF == 0.

------
lawrenceyan
When Intel repeatedly says they're going to continue making the modems for the
iPhone up to 2020 but now have shown themselves to have been blatantly lying,
clearly this has to be illegal or at least warrant an investor lawsuit right?

~~~
dwaite
You don’t believe the 2019 iPhones (which will be the flagships until Sept
2020) will contain Intel LTE modems?

~~~
lawrenceyan
Did you read the linked news piece before commenting? It says it directly
there:

> "The company will continue to meet current customer commitments for its
> existing 4G smartphone modem product line, but does not expect to launch 5G
> modem products in the smartphone space, including those originally planned
> for launches in 2020."

