Right now Apple is several years ahead of other high end phone manufacturers in CPUs. If they cripple Qualcomm's high end modem business by taking most of it away from them, they could extend the same lead to modems.

I hear this statement a lot... how is this determined?

The counter argument is that the other systems make up for this by having more cores, which is really a cop out. Single threaded execution has a far more direct effect on user experience, gaming performance, etc. They can't compete in core engineering so make it up by slapping on more fairly generic cores. It does appear that Samsung is responding to this and investing in more advanced core designs.

The final area is custom features like the neural engine behind real-time face recognition, real time 3D face lighting effects and such. The competition don't really have these at all, so we don't know how far behind they are.

There's a pretty good article on this linked below.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4138071-apple-cpu-advantage...

Here's the Anandtech article on the "few" tweaks Samsung has made to its 6 wide decode custom M3 cores in the upcoming Exynos 9810.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12361/samsung-exynos-m3-archi...

Looking back, it makes sense that Qualcomm discarded their underperforming custom design efforts (at least for the mobile market). If ARM can deliver a competitive design, why not fully commit to their roadmap and save significant amounts on R&D costs?

I sometimes wonder how much of It Just Works was influenced by having slower machines. When doing everything takes longer, if you do it right the first time then it’s still faster than doing it twice.

The other license is getting ARM's implementation of a CPU (ie A57, A72 etc). Customers can parametize # cores, cache size, memory width etc, but the basic architecture is fixed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Microcontroller_Bus...

Secondly theres a large ecosystem of add on components designed work with ARM and be dropped into ARM SOCS, such as GPUs, Wifi modules, Gyroscopes, wireless modems, GPS, etc.

Thirdly there are a lot of SOC engineers very familiar with ARM. You can hire them streight from competitors, or college, including PHDs that have done research on it. Youd need to train up any new hirs from scratch on your architecture.

Finally theres a huge software development tool chain built around the established processor architectures. To support a new architecture youd also need to build a set of compiler back ends, bearing in mind the existing ones benefit from many years of tweaking and optimization.

I think both these metrics are now adequate, battery life is the single metric I am interested in now.

Qualcomm probably could make better CPUs...but it needs to sell them for a profit, and they might not fit into all phone's physical size or power budget.

So, Qualcomm ends up making somewhat lowest-common-denominator chips. Economies of scale make it difficult to make a run of super good chips when Samsung uses its own in many markets, Apple uses its own--the world of high-end smartphones outside of Samsung and Apple is just too small.

They're taking their CPUs and clocking them at speeds the device can't support, except when brand new, then letting the device slow down over the corse of its usable lifespan.

It would be interested to compare an Apple and Qualcomm CPU after a year and a half, to see how the benchmarks have changed.

Really, because I have not heard of any other manufacturer with this problem?

https://mashable.com/2018/01/04/apple-slowing-down-iphones-w...

https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/29/16829512/...

https://www.engadget.com/2017/12/29/samsung-lg-claim-older-p...

https://forums.androidcentral.com/samsung-galaxy-note-8/8589...

This isn’t considered controversial

Snark aside, Apple's CPUs are pretty(really pretty) far ahead of Qualcomm's in single-threaded performance.

But it doesn't matter because if you're building an Android device you can't buy an A chip for it.

Any proper iOS application with be doing lots of GCD dispatchs, for starters.

Likewise on Android, Google had to change the OS behavior to just kill apps that insist in misusing the UI thread for long running tasks.

I don't remember when it was the last time any of my applications only had a single thread of execution on them, beyond shell and Python scripts.

Maybe around 2000.

And even then, the OS is juggling processes across all cores every few ms, so outside any benchmark winning game, there isn't much real world value in single thread performance.

Err, certainly this would just result in vertical integration (IE one of these companies buying Qualcomm), or any other situations, rather than "everyone sucks except for Apple" as you posit

Or, it could result in vertical integration and "everyone sucks except for Apple."

Does Apple even integrate a modem into their SoC's? I find it hard to believe that they can be years ahead of other high end phone SoC's manufactures when they haven't even accomplished that. Additionally, Samsung claims a 2x increase in their new Exynos 9810 SoC [1] which means that it should have single thread performance that is in the ballpark of Apple SoC's.

With a clock speed of up to 2.9GHz, a 3rd generation custom CPU offers higher computing power so that its single-core and multi-core performances are improved around two-fold and 40 percent respectively when compared to its predecessor.

[1]http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/exynos/product...

If by dominance being the largest Semiconductor company then yes, possibly. But not because Apple continue to grow infinitely, but both competitor are shrinking.

Apple is already close to Intel in terms of processor shipped, and is certainly larger then Intel in terms of CPU. And when Apple decide to have its own modem, Intel will ship another ~150M less unit.

Apple has roughly 20% of world wide market share. Qualcomm, with the shrinking % of 300M unit modem to Apple, may one day lost all of that when Apple decide to make it themselves. For the other 80%, there is roughly 20% at the bottom that Qualcomm will not compete in. With less then 60% of market, 40% of those are from Samsung, Huawei, BBK, and Xiaomi. Both Samsung and Huawei are planning to use their own SoC in the high end flagship phone, BBK are thinking of making their own as well. And you have Mediatek making gains at the bottom to mid end of the market. All of a sudden Qualcomm has less then 50% of Smartphone market to work with.

If Apple do actually have an team working on Modem, I wonder when will Apple becomes the largest purchaser in Semiconductor.

But they can't overlook the Nth American market where Snapdragon dominates the US with CDMA2000 support.

This brings me to my main problem with Apple; as a consumer of technology in a the developing world. For Apple, I don’t exist, or at least the vast majority of my us don’t. The technology is always priced beyond our reach. Some individuals can afford them, but the vast majority have to use alternatives. Any success in slowing down Android would have meant no smart phones for us. Most people I know can’t afford an iPhone. This is what I consider the other side of the Apple story.

Respectfully, Apple is/was/tries to be a luxury and aspirational brand. They're expensive, everyone knows it. It's like saying that BMWs fault is that their cars aren't cheap.

Totally unrelated; car manufacturers share technology quite a bit.

So what you're asking is not only for them to sell their IP to 3rd parties (a business model of partners they've repeatedly crushed) but also to build out an entirely separate chip design team focused on a new market.

That’d also be consistent with their past history of trying to pick some edge for a particular market: optimized for media processing, ML, VR/AR, etc. rather than just competing with x86 for the generic workloads. I still don’t see it as a high probability but I’d expect a niche if it happens at all.