Competition Is Back!
New York Times
Qualcomm is the sole producer of the wireless chip, Snapdragon, for Android phones in the United States. Galaxies (Samsung), Pixels (Google), you name it. They’re also a monopoly, which allows them to manipulate the ways their customers (like Samsung and Apple) can make a deal with them to sell their phones here.
Back in the late 2000s, Snapdragon had slight competition with Intel’s Atom, which wasn’t as integrative with their chip. Qualcomm had low power and long battery life with their one chip, along with a background on the cell phone market. Intel had to separate crucial parts of their chip, onto another chip. Snapdragon was a win from the start.
The first Android phone, the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1 had the 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7201A. The first iPhone (2007) had an Apple-branded Samsung ARM 11 processor running at 412 MHz until choosing TSMC to manufacture their A8 in their iPhone 6/Plus (2014). Currently in the smartphone world, we have the Snapdragon 855 and the A12 Bionic chipsets in the US.
These two monopolies pertaining to the smartphone giants had everything going smooth until Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 (2015). The complaints of overheating and Samsung’s test in Korea which resulted in the same thing, encouraged Samsung to use their own chip, Exynos 7420, to not suffer overheating as well. The reason it hasn’t been done before is because of the superior LTE integration Snapdragon/Qualcomm has in the US compared to other chip manufacturers.
On the breaking news of May 22nd:
The defendant being Qualcomm.
FossPatents
Qualcomm loaded its own gun and shot itself. However, prior to this victory for competition, Qualcomm and Apple ended their lawsuit last month, with Apple paying Qualcomm and entering two licensing agreements: one for patents and for chipsets. This could possibly mean a 5G iPhone in the works. With this agreement, Intel dropped out of the 5G race. Qualcomm already has a 5G silicon out already, the X50, with the X55 powering phones late this year to next year. With my research and understanding, the X50 was announced in 2016, but it looks like it was a test run chip to further improve on it for the next generation, which is now the X55.
The bigger picture allows other chip makers to enter the US and grow their chips with fair negotiations on behalf of the now-regulated Qualcomm. The results of this could be endless: more phones (instead of the usual Samsung/Apple duopoly), Google’s own chip could finally come to fruition (fingers crossed) and software optimizations could improve as well (instead of having to work around Snapdragon’s flaws.) The expansion of 5G onto other chips could be possible as well, since Qualcomm is trying to gain the upper hand in 5G, being the implementer of CDMA networks and all.
This is good. This is really good.
