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Comment by TorKlingberg | Hacker News Reader

I can add a bit of technical context here. High-end phones usually have a baseband chip separate from the main SoC. There is also an RF chip and some discrete components in front of the antennas. Qualcomm is quite dominant, but Apple has switched to Intel over the last few years.

In low- or mid-end phones the baseband is usually integrated in the main SoC. Taiwanese MediaTek is the biggest supplier. Unisoc clearly wants to compete with MediaTek, and Intels modem division has trouble getting into low-end phones as nobody wants complete Intel SoCs in phones. So they agreed to integrate Intels modem as an IP block in Unisoc chips.

In tablets and the few laptops that have mobile data the baseband + RF are usually on a modem module, M.2 or similar. The Librem 5 phone also takes this approach.

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I thought Qualcomm integrated all that onto the SOC after LTE. LTE was a huge battery drain at first because they weren't integrated.

Am I not understanding something here?

Qualcomm sells discrete modems as well. (Apple used to be their major customer for them).

https://www.qualcomm.com/products/modems

Apple devices (and a handful of android tablets) use separate baseband chips. Most android SoCs have the baseband on the same silicon as the arm cores.

your understanding is correct except apple everyone else using qualcomm's soc in premium phones uses integrated baseband inside qc's soc. There is one difference though first launches at the time of "G" tansitions i.e. 3g to 4g,4g to 5g also use discrete modems because technology is generally not mature enough to be integrated into soc.

Ok, that makes sense. And is yet another good reason not to get a gen one 5G phone...

Security wise it’s much better having the separated usb connected baseband. Much more control of what comes in and out of the application processor.

> LTE was a huge battery drain at first because they weren't integrated

No, the modem/SoC integration is not a big factor. Having an internal communication inside a single SoC will always be a bit better than going through an external interface, but it's not a significant impact when compared to the total phone power consumption. As other have said, iPhones have an external modem and are fine. Qualcomm insisted on this because they had it, and they're good at marketing.

LTE was a drain at first for the same reason 3G was a drain at first. Cellular standards are designed to have a long life, and are over dimensioned initially. Then Moore law and other optimizations kicks in and make things more acceptable. This is intentional, otherwise the standard would not make the best use of technology over time. And this is something where we need to keep an eye for 5G: Moore law, strictly speaking (higher density for the least cost process. One can still get better, for a higher price) is over. Hopefully 5G will have properly taken this into account.

But then for 5G a big part of the power will be in the RF front-end, with all those antennas. Here too it'll be interesting to see how it evolves over time.

> As other have said, iPhones have an external modem and are fine. Qualcomm insisted on this because they had it, and they're good at marketing.

Addressing the second sentence - I have no knowledge of what transpired but my assumption would be a combination of Apple didn't want to have their SOC's fab'd by Qualcomm for the sake of an integrated modem, and Qualcomm didn't want TSMC fab'ing their modem IP into Apple's SOC's, so the obvious solution was a discrete modem which was a product they could offer.

Qualcomm is also fabless and switched from Samsung to tsmc.

It's almost certainly due to Apple wanting flexibility in changing suppliers. Qualcomm was also not going to give them the rf crown jewels either

The wording makes it extremely unclear. Both Company don't "Fab" those SoC. What you are suggesting is Qualcomm doesn't want to give the IP to Apple for Modem SoC Integration, and Apple doesn't want to give their IP to Qualcomm's SoC designed specially for Apple.

While those point are valid they are not the reason Apple have a separate Modem Chip. The design of iPhone had the Modem literally in a completely isolated system, and act more like a USB modem directly connected to the Internal iPhone for security purposes.

And as other have mentioned the integrated of Modem within the SoC have minimal impact to overall battery life.

Qualcomm's first 5G modems (the ones that will ship this year) will not be integrated into the SoC.

I wonder if China has developed the mmWave in silicon that will be required for the beam steering front ends?

Huawei is far ahead of others in mMIMO technology and have this implemented in their BTS boards, although right now it is done in FPGA not ASIC.

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