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Wireless Networking Apple Hardware

Apple Is Reportedly Making An All-In-One Cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth Chip (theverge.com) 36

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
Apple is working on a new in-house chip that would power cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth functionality on its devices, according to a report from Bloomberg. The Verge reports: The company is also developing its own chip that would replace the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip it currently uses from Broadcom, Bloomberg says, which it wants to begin using in devices in 2025. Bloomberg also shared some new information about Apple's efforts to develop its own cellular modems to replace Qualcomm's. While Qualcomm recently said it expects to have the "vast majority" of 5G modems for 2023 iPhones, Bloomberg says Apple will use its own modems "by the end of 2024 or early 2025." It will apparently start by using its custom modem in one product and fully transition them over the course of approximately three years.
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Apple Is Reportedly Making An All-In-One Cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth Chip More

Apple Is Reportedly Making An All-In-One Cellular, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth Chip

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  • Don't buy the first ones (Score:3)

    by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Monday January 09, 2023 @09:22PM (#63194080)

    RF is hard and Apple will have to learn a lot before they get it right.

    • Re:Don't buy the first ones (Score:5, Insightful)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Monday January 09, 2023 @09:45PM (#63194124)
      I wouldn't count them out. They obviously have a shit ton of money to buy as much talent as they care to, and their CPU team has churned out designs that compete with Intel and AMD, some of whom have gone on to work at Qualcomm and have given them a competitive CPU as well. I think they've been working on this for a while and that it's finally good enough to go into products.

      • I wouldn't count them out.

        Of course not. Remember there's nothing wrong with Apple. You're just holding it wrong. /s Normally this line is used as a joke, but it's never been more relevant than it is now. Apple does *not* have a good track record from combining the purposes of RF components, in the case in question it was incorporating RF antennas into the handset case.

        Their CPU team is as you say excellent but you left out a word. They are *now* churning out designs that compete with Intel and AMD. Which is a good effort, but none

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I wouldn't count them out. They obviously have a shit ton of money to buy as much talent as they care to, and their CPU team has churned out designs that compete with Intel and AMD, some of whom have gone on to work at Qualcomm and have given them a competitive CPU as well. I think they've been working on this for a while and that it's finally good enough to go into products.

        A few problems.

        First, analog and digital electronics are completely different beasts. A division who makes excellent digital logic chi

    • Do you not recall that a few years ago they bought Intelâ(TM)s RF modem team? But let us assume, falsely that it did not happen. Do you really think Apple hires people with a blank resume, who have to learn analog design from scratch? You donâ(TM)t think they hired people who already built stuff like this?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Tailhook ( 98486 )

        First, what Apple bought for a piffling $1 billion from Intel could vanish tomorrow and no one would notice. It has no track record, trivial marketshare and was mostly about IP anyhow.

        Second, Apple doesn't perform flawlessly. Remember "You're holding it wrong?" Butterfly keyboards? Batterygate?

        Third, RF today is much harder than it was even a few years ago. Every form of digital wireless is more complex and is operating on more bands than ever. Establishing parity with existing vendors is a monume

        • Lmfao, that was a dumb purchase too. Intels broadband chips were garbage, sucking up twice as much power for less performance. Wifi and CPU skills are VASTLY different! Would have purchased Broadcom or some other company with a reputation for good wireless products if i were serious bout it

        • Third, RF today is much harder than it was even a few years ago. Every form of digital wireless is more complex and is operating on more bands than ever. Establishing parity with existing vendors is a monumental task and shortfalls are highly likely.

          This is probably true if you intend to support all previous technologies (2G, 3G, Edge, and so on).

          It may be much easier to do if you "just" plan to implement 5G (and maybe 4G also?). This requires patience, until the coverage is good enough.

          And it would be very Apple-like to pull the plug on ancient technologies. Do I need to make a list ?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Thing is Intel's modems were shit. Apple had to cripple iPhones with Qualcomm modems in them so that they were as slow as the Intel ones, in order not to make buying an iPhone a performance lottery.

        • Intel really failed spectacularly at chips for phones, huh? They couldn't scale StrongARM up or down successfully, their modem is shit... Why are they failing so much harder than everyone else?

  • It will still be paying big $ to Qualcomm though (Score:3)

    by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Monday January 09, 2023 @09:23PM (#63194084)

    Apple will no doubt still have to pay big patent royalties to Qualcomm for all the cellular patents Qualcomm holds.

  • I really hope this dumb Idea remains in the Apple Ecosystem :)

    The last thing we need is WIFI sitting anywhere the clusterF bluetooth is.

    • Most of the wifi chips have bluetooth as well; it is essentially free to add it.

    • Re:I hope Apple only (Score:5, Informative)

      by seth_hartbecke ( 27500 ) on Monday January 09, 2023 @10:54PM (#63194250) Homepage

      So, doing work in the embedded, IoT and IoT + Cellular space I can tell you: there are a LOT of chips that combine WiFi and Bluetooth.

      Was there a problem in the early days with them co-existing: yes. But, there has been a lot of work done to control transmit timing to enable peaceful co-existance. So much so that when you're building an embedded plant for you look FOR the combined chipsets, so that you can rely on somebody else having done all the co-existance timing stuff for you.

      For example, I build products around this LTE for IoT chipset from Telit: https://www.telit.com/devices/... [telit.com] It's a 'nice' chip for embedded IoT space. Does most of the cellular work for you. A few dozen AT commands at startup should get it running correctly every time. You can talk to it over USB and get things that behave like Ethernet interfaces, or bring PPP over USB or if have a very simple platform it has an embedded TCP stack that you can interact with using AT commands over RS232 (an option if your processor is something very simple like an Arduio where a full IP stack on that end takes up a lot).

      They make a "daughter" chip that works with it: https://www.telit.com/devices/... [telit.com] This is a combined WiFi+Bluetooth module. You don't wire your main processor at all to the "daughter" chip. They're a few pads between the "cellular" chip and the "wifichip" that you connect, and all the data/commands relay via the cellular chip.

      If you pull the product spec sheets, you'll see that some of this pads you connect are timing pads. This is so that the main "cellular" chip can control when any of the radio are transmitting, or signal to kindly hold their data burst for a bit while another of the radios IS transmitting.

      Point is: if you are SERIOUS about this space, you DO want a combined chipset that is handling all the control of the radio timings between Cellular, WiFi and Bluetooth. Apple isn't really "pioneering" a path here, they are following the direction the industry has already realized it needs to go.

      Apple isn't doing anything new. They are just choosing to do it themselves. And, I wish them the best of luck at it. They didn't do anything "new" when they started making their own custom CPUs, but have really taken the lead in showing the world what ARM CAN do if you really take your time to really do it right. I hope they do the same in this space. But I expect the first generation or two to be ... a learning process.

    • The last thing we need is WIFI sitting anywhere the clusterF bluetooth is.

      Literally nearly every device on the market combines wifi and bluetooth on a single chip. Not just phones either, but laptops and pc motherboards as well.

  • The math must support it (Score:3)

    by BishopBerkeley ( 734647 ) on Monday January 09, 2023 @09:53PM (#63194138) Journal
    Given the number of iPhones Apple sells, saving a buck or two per phone in royalties paid to Qualcom and Broadcom will effect savings of nearly half a billion a year, enough to justify the multibillion dollar investment. Apple stock is a hold.

  • This doesn't just pave the way for cramming more functionality into a given space. If this works and becomes widely adopted, it will also make it more difficult, or even impossible, to build a phone with hardware switches that definitively turn off BT and WiFi without disabling cellular.

    Not that the average phone user has a clue about why they should care. It's amazing to me that most people don't even think about the implications of the tech they use and wear, much less that they might demand something lik

    • I don't think ive ever seen a phone with a hardware switch for the wifi/bt/cellular, sure they all have software toggles. I haven't even seen a laptop with a hardware wifi switch in some decade or more now.

    • I personally wouldn't mind hardware switches. At the minimum, something like Lenovo laptops with the slider that goes in front of the camera, making it easy to tell if the camera is disabled. If HW vendors could add a switch for the mic, that would go a long way in ensuring privacy.

  • https://www.qualcomm.com/news/... [qualcomm.com]

    Qualcomm actually has experience designing these communication chips.

  • Putting many chips on one chip isn't exactly innovation, it's kinda been going on a long time, just progression.

    As someone that had a ABIT BP7 dually rig back in the day and now currently uses a AMD 3600G daily that has like 6 Cores and what used to be a graphic card in it, not super impressed by a Cell/WiFi/Bluetooth. I mean the big reason to do it, at least in computer terms, is to not have to use a traditional bus architecture to talk between things which is slower than onboard chip. Heck, again from PC

  • Just like every other piece of hardware they've "decided to do themselves".

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