How are Huawei, Apple and Samsung beating Qualcomm so easily?
Did Qualcomm just beat Intel in the mobile market and then just become complacent with patents?
Did Qualcomm just beat Intel in the mobile market and then just become complacent with patents?
In this case it's a server chip so it's a little different.
It is only because Qualcomm can't go against Mediatek on its home soil, they went after their channel, and clients in courts.
I believe that Huawei's decision to home source its own SoC was also in part dictated by them being afraid of channel risk (i.e. Mediatek going down to lawsuit, or the civil war restarting)
BTW, if anybody remembers the company called Allwinner that was all the rage during tablet boom. I have 100% certain info that they too got into secret non-compete with Qualcomm in exchange for distribution rights of their low-end chips for 10 years.
> It is only because Qualcomm can't go against Mediatek on its home soil, they went after their channel, and clients in courts.
Qualcomm, or wireless patent holders in general, never go after component makers; as a long-held industry practice, they always go after the handset makers for maximum royalty. That practice has been upheld by regulators around the world -- though there is a lawsuit by the FTC to change that at Apple's behest now. This also presumably allows new entrants to enter the wireless chip business and, therefore, increase competition.
Qualcomm further is not exactly known for lawsuits, though it always seems to be fighting regulators around the world. It reportedly initiated fewer than 3 lawsuits in the past two years -- now compared to Apple's 90+ pending lawsuits.
No, plainly speaking. There was never was a real SoC from them. Intel bought an already dead business from Infineon.
> Qualcomm, or wireless patent holders in general, never go after component makers; as a long-held industry practice, they always go after the handset makers for maximum royalty.
No, anybody with a real business, and not living off patent trolling will not do that, and did not do that. Only QCM really have no head on their shoulders there to risk everything in a retaliatory lawsuit every time.
> That practice has been upheld by regulators around the world
No, completely not the case. I worked in electronics business for close to 12 years now, and I know few things about how patent law actually works in real world.
Qualcomm was show to the door great many times by courts during their peak patent trolling a decade ago, in I think more than 10 countries.
I wasn't asking your opinion on what wireless licensing ought to be; this licensing model has long been upheld by regulators and accepted by companies around the world for decades. Even China's antitrust regulator NDRC who fined Qualcomm to the tune of $975M last year supports their royalty model (https://www.winston.com/images/content/1/0/v2/100610/HarrisJ...):
"... Qualcomm will charge royalties for 3G and 4G Chinese SEPs for branded smartphones sold for use in China based on a royalty base of 65 percent of the net selling price of the smartphone and royalty rates of 5 percent for 3G devices and 3.5 percent for 4G phones; ..."
And all wireless patents holders like Ericsson, Nokia, etc use the same royalty basis (ie, system level licensing) and similar royalty rates a bit lower. If you weren't unaware of it, now you know it.
I've been around the software business for 20 years now though it doesn't make me an legal expert on anything, much less transnational IP laws. I just try not to make any empty position without evidence.
That's nothing much than a political move to appease USA. There is really no law in China that ever says any of terms named, they (NRDC) made it up on the go. From standpoint of Chinese legal system, there are simply no legal reasoning for that. Because to them it sounds like: "if you don't buy our chips, we will sue you," and that doesn't make any sense to the judges. In Chinese, the judgement effectively read like "we make a concession for you because big papa is behind you."
When Qualcomm was suing Nokia and Siemens a decade ago, German courts, I think, threw out more 10 of their lawsuits out of the court.
And appease USA? As I noted earlier, Obama's USFTC filed a lawsuit challenging Qualcomm's licensing practices. Who exactly was the NDRC appeasing? Qualcomm or USA? The NDRC's action is contrary to the USA's policy and China isn't going to win new friend by contradicting US's policy goals.
Again, the system level licensing is not only widely accepted and upheld industry practice. Take another instance of the UMTS IPR Association's statement on system level licensing in wireless industry:
" ... The royalty “collection point” shall be the last manufacturer in the manufacturing “chain.”This means that chip and subsystem manufacturers shall be indemnified for sales made toLicensees of certified Essential Patents who are the last manufacturers in the “chain.”Licensees shall not include those manufacturers of component products which are incorporated into final assembled products for which royalties are paid to their respective Licensor(s) ..."
* 3G Patent Platform for 3G Mobile Communication Systems – Definition, Function,Structure, Operation, Governance, UMTS IPR ASSOCIATION, Section 8.2.6 (June 15, 2000)
Since it's more about trust, having more actors on the market is a good things, as it gives more options for the rest of us.
Also, Apple has a full ARM license and full control over the OS and the software that runs on it. Which means it is very well possible that they have extended the instruction set to accelerate real-world JS performance.
Its a complete vertical integration and no one should be surprised that a general purpose kernel (linux) running a AOT/JIT'ed environment on top of an os abstraction layer (android) on top of processors frequently designed to exist in applications that aren't phones gets beaten on a phone centric benchmark. Call me when someone gets a big hadoop benchmark or dpdk results on an apple core.
"What is quite astonishing, is just how close Apple’s A11 and A12 are to current desktop CPUs. I haven’t had the opportunity to run things in a more comparable manner, but taking our server editor, Johan De Gelas’ recent figures from earlier this summer, we see that the A12 outperforms a moderately-clocked Skylake CPU in single-threaded performance. Of course there’s compiler considerations and various frequency concerns to take into account, but still we’re now talking about very small margins until Apple’s mobile SoCs outperform the fastest desktop CPUs in terms of ST performance. It will be interesting to get more accurate figures on this topic later on in the coming months."
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re...
moderately clocked skylake != "best desktop processors"
There is a good 2x perf difference between a 2 something Ghz skylake and a 4.5Ghz skylake, particularly on L2 cache bound single thread benchmarks (which is what specint2006 is these days, its more a cache benchmark except for libquantum which is "broken" and more accurately reflects clockrate*cores). A moderately clocked skylake is a laptop.
But you say, IPC matters!!! Sure it does, but a microarch with the same IPC and the ability to clock 2x faster is generally a 2x faster CPU.
Nor is apple shipping a phone with 16+ cores...
People have been saying their phones were as fast as their desktops for years, and its not anymore true today than it was 5 years ago. Its questionable whether it will really ever happen as there is this heat/power dissipation problem in phones that desktops don't have. Not to mention desktops don't have nearly the physical constraints on RAM/storage/IO capacity you find in a phone/laptop.
If Snapdragons get too expensive, phone manufacturers will switch to Huawei / Samsung / MediaTek, but Apple can absorb a $5 or $10 increase in per chip cost for better performance and power efficiency since it is vertically integrated.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/
That's what you get from frothing at the mouth over "entering the huge Chinese market" by giving away all of your IP and tech through coerced "joint ventures" only to later see yourself kicked out of the market and some multi-billion dollar Chinese competitors selling your tech much more cheaply.
And there's this sweet irony, too:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/u-s-star-...
If you think all of this is far-fetched, do read on Nortel and Huawei's "joint venture", which led to the demise of Nortel and the domination of Huawei in Canada:
https://www.lightreading.com/nortel-huawei-kill-jv/d/d-id/62...
https://www.assemblymag.com/blogs/14-assembly-blog/post/9063...
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60...
That's not to downplay the idiocy of Qualcomm's board and leadership, which also played a huge role in all of this, as well as Qualcomm being involved in multiple antitrust lawsuits. The board and leadership should have been fired at least two years ago. They allowed their greed to stay in the way of the company's technical progress and decided to make money from bullying other companies instead of continuing to improve their products (most of which are just rehashed stock Arm designs these days).
I used to work for Nortel and they went the way of the dodo because they were like Nokia (which ended the same way. I worked with them at some point as well...): Too bureaucratic, too slow, not hungry anymore, poor management.
For their last CEO they ended up paying $12 million to Motorola because that guy breached the non-competition agreement he had when he took the job at Nortel... Just an example.
[0] http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Part+Last+things+first...
Your last point regarding cash is also an example of poor management in my book.
It's too easy to always find scapegoats.
I also think it's simplistic to say their cash issue was purely an issue of poor management, as it resulted in part due to the unforeseen financial collapse at the time.
Of course you can try to define both of those as "poor management" as well: Nortel should have protected itself better from hackers. Or they should have been prepared for a financial collapse on a scale not seen for 80 years.
Under this type of reasoning, any problem at all for any company anywhere could be defined as "poor management" and that all companies fail from poor management. The problem is that this overly simplifies rather complex issues. It's a bit like saying "Everyone dies of heart failure." Because in every instance of death the heart has stopped beating. In every instance of a company failure, its managers failed to act in a way that might save the company, therefore management was poor.
It neglects the difference between proximate causes and distal causes. It ignores that, for example, the heart may have stopped because a bullet hit an artery and a person lost too much blood. Back to companies, it ignores the difficult questions of "Why & How did management fail? What, if anything, could they have done differently given the knowledge they had at the time? Would those things have been enough?"
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/report-ch...
[1]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/15/nortel_breach/
[2]https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/nortel-collapse-linked-to-c...
A great example, maybe my favorite, where poor management was really a primary issue was the death of Circuit City. There as they faced increasing competition from internet sales, Best Buy, and other competitors, they sought to cut costs in part by firing the highest paid floor sales staff, replacing them with lower paid, usually minimum wage workers. Some of those higher paid workers may have been dead weight, but on the whole they represented the most experienced, most knowledgeable floor staff best able to help customers (or more cynically sell them on stuff they didn't need with techno-jargon). In any case, it was a very short jump from there to revenue falling off a cliff, and bankruptcy. So poor management, absolutely foreseeable, directly caused their downfall. Though even there the poor management was partly a result of externalities like increased online shopping putting previously non-existent pressure on them.
So 100% lack of foresight, but the real screw-up was by 1997 or so everybody and their dog was trying to sell everything under the sun online. Where was sears, still stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that internet sales were just the modern version of the business model that worked immensely well for sears.
How much would it have cost them to resurrect some form of mail-order/web forms read some business journals about Dell's order and deliver model and start making some side bets and deals with UPS/fedex?
I'd love to know what their thinking was in the late 90's. I can imagine that management for brick & mortar stores might have pushed back on making inroads on the internet out of fear it would cannibalize their sales, and blocked it internally. Or it could simply have been inertia and a blind spot against noticing that "internet" wasn't a flash in the pan fad.
Admit it - you're the real common link here... /s
And what gov't contracts? Unlike what China is doing today, there was no such overt protectionist gov't policies implemented here. Much of the demand for tech products and R&D were driven by the cold war between the WW2 and the fall of Berlin Wall. The stylized fact that there are now fewer than a few US memory makers, namely Micron and Intel, from two dozens in the 70's and 80's demonstrates how little the gov't contract has done to "protect" the industry.
China's policy of forcing foreign companies to give up their IP for access to domestic market and seeding unlimited gov't subsidy is based on the Japanese model in the 80's. Their model however fell apart as Japan's economy declined and the Japanese companies focused on quality, not on mass manufacturing to compete with emerging South Korean competitors like Samsung.
Unlike Japan's large domestic market, South Korea had very little market of their own and was geared toward purely for export. It didn't coerce foreign companies to drop all their patent lawsuits or future lawsuit like the Chinese gov't reportedly demanded Samsung and SK Hynix last week.
Needlessly to say, equating China's outright IP theft to the industry policy of the US or South Korea is a bit asinine.
* Noh, "Samsung, SK Hynix: Pay fines, or drop all existing or future patents lawsuits; China demands South Korean companies to give up their IP", Hankyung Economic Times, Dec 26, 2018 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=TT&sl=ko&tl...
* Kang, JoonKyu, A study of the DRAM industry, 2010, MIT PhD Thesis https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/59138/6595145...
Credit where Credit's due, Samsung's Electronics R&D is absolutely one of the best on the planet. But it doesn't clear them as being clean.