Intel, as we’ve previously covered, is one of the few players left in the 4G modem business at all. While there were a number of companies in the 3G modem business, many of them have dropped out of the race or consolidated their efforts at 4G. Qualcomm controls the overwhelming majority of the market. Intel, meanwhile, has eked out a handful of wins, but not much more than that. Several years ago, Intel decided to keep its modem efforts focused on TSMC and the 28nm node rather than porting their own technology to 14nm and 4G.
This raises the interesting question as opposed to a hypothetical solution for the iPhone that can be used 7. Built on TSMC Intel XMM 7360 is a 28nm chip, but if it is felt that the company's business success, Intel, Apple is likely to develop a 14nm solution. Cellular baseband moving lower process nodes very different beast than the same work is related to traditional semiconductors.
VentureBeat is reporting that Intel has over a thousand people working to develop a modem that would fit Apple’s specifications and claims that a deal “will happen if Intel continues to hit its project milestones.” We’d take this with a larger grain of salt. There’s no doubt that Intel would love to be Apple’s modem supplier of choice, or even to serve as a dual supplier in some markets — either situation would give the mobile division a much-needed revenue and visibility boost. In theory, winning the modem could open the door to fabbing integrated SoCs for Apple, though we suspect such a deal would need to clear mammoth structural hurdles to be attractive to either party.
An Intel / Apple married to predict that the problem of the two organizations often conflicting goals. Apple does not share space with its brand; Intel typically requires top billing. Apple is likely to develop its own CPU architectures, Intel, x86 design, Apple will sell. Apple appears to be moving toward a second sourcing A9 split it between TSMC and Samsung are very reluctant to allow Intel to be the second-sourcing of its products - that created that AMD's x86 (Intel, from the point of view) is wrong license.
All of these problems could be overcome with sufficient amounts of cash, but collectively they’re significant enough that we’ve never been all that gung-ho on the “Intel builds chips for Apple” concept. Selling a modem into the iPhone would be a huge win for Santa Clara, but locking down the entire design is orders of magnitude less likely.
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