This isnât true. Non-Qualcomm Android devices are plentiful in most of the world. The two largest Android vendors have their own SOCs, which they use when possible. Qualcomm has about half the Android SOC market (by revenue). Itâs totally absurd to claim that the other half of the market isnât widely commercially available. What do you imagine is being done with all those chips? Theyâre being dumped into the ocean?
Thatâs not really how the world has worked for the last decade.
Except itâs not an aberration. Look at every other non-Apple SOC maker. Theyâre no faster. Look at the painfully low increases in Intelâs single core performance since Sandy Bridge (released 7 years ago).
I really donât get where youâre coming from with this paragraph. Nobody here is sad; everyone but you is appears to be basically OK with the performance of their phones.
Look, maybe your company made some bad technology choices due to misunderstanding the industry trends. But itâs not the end of the world. Iâm sure you can optimize the software somehow. Hey, Iâve got an idea! How about using pages instead of this infinite scroll?
Try â85mph top speed is enough for me personally.â Iâve got no more objection to you obsessing over benchmarks than I would over you racing at the salt flats, but neither impacts me. More power is certainly welcome, but not worth sacrificing other factors for.
You can stop typing after that sentence; it tells the complete story.
I recently mailed a Google Pixel 2 XL to a coworker in Brazil, and because I (foolishly?) marked it with actual value when I shipped it, they got rolled by Brazilian customs for $1200 dollars â more than the value of the actual device â import duties to pick it up. So I may be a little pissed at Brazil right now.
In which countries are they âplentifulâ? China? Certainly not here in the US or Europe. This is equivalent to the pathetic âyou forgot about Polandâ counter-argument to the Iraq invasion. Hey letâs look at this August 2017 list of best 5 android budget phones, shall we? Donât bother reading, Iâll summarize for you:
Qualcomm Snapdragon 625
Qualcomm Snapdragon 430
Qualcomm Snapdragon 625
Qualcomm Snapdragon 430
Qualcomm Snapdragon 625
Gee, J Snell, I hope you fuckinâ like snapdragons! Because thatâs all youâll be getting.
And yet, none of them perform any better than Qualcomm, which is why they donât use them very much. Sure, if weâre getting into ultra low end third world dreck like frickinâ Mediatek, then I guess? Itâs almost like thereâs a systemic hardware problem in the Android ecosystemâŠ
Of course, we have seen a number of manufacturers attempt to provide this sort of competition in the past, before bowing out of the market. Texas Instrumentsâ OMAP ARM processors powered a selection of Android devices back around 2011 and 2012. More recently, Intelâs Atom processor appeared in the ASUS Zenfone 2 and Nvidiaâs Tegra range has attempted to bring graphics grunt to a small selection of products.
Qualcommâs CDMA and 4G LTE royalties ensure a steady income thatâs unavailable to other smartphone SoC manufacturers.
Unfortunately weâre unlikely to see a major breakthrough from another SoC vendor any time soon, as Qualcommâs lucrative business model provides cash for R&D and contract negotiation leverage that smaller chip companies just donât have. Qualcomm owns patents for a number of hugely important mobile technologies. The company earns money from every phone sale, even those that donât use a Qualcomm chip, as 3G CDMA and 4G LTE data technologies are based primarily on the companyâs IP. If your phone has a CDMA or LTE modem, even one designed and manufactured by another company, Qualcomm takes a cut.
That was written in 2017, now guess what happened in 2018? Qualcomm as an evil, incompetent monopoly? I am shocked, I tell you, shocked to my very core, sir!
At least Intel was a competent monopolist, with products that were, yâknow, FUCKING FAST?
You know damn well weâre talking about mobile / table here, not desktop. Iâd agree thereâs been tepid improvement on desktop for the last 8 years, but the desktop is wildly mature compared to mobile, which is still in âpush the pedal to the metalâ mode and quite exciting. Well, it is if you donât look at Qualcomm, anyway.
Letâs look at that, shall we? How about some hot, sweet JavaScript action, because that is what this topic is about, isnât it?
The Qualcomm status quo is awful, performance wise. You should be pissed, rather than shrugging and saying âoh well, I guess our best isnât very good.â Whereâs the competition? Even at their worst AMD got in the general ballpark of Intel in overall performance, and Qualcomm isnât even close to where Apple is right now.
Yes, of course they donât perform any better (or worse) than Qualcomm. That was the fucking point. Itâs just that (to repeat this once again), youâre provably wrong about the second point. And the alternatives are used a lo+t. Qualcomm has about half the Android SOC market.
Do you seriously not see the huge disconnect in your argument? You type hundreds of posts about how Qualcomm is uniquely bad and responsible for all the evil in the world. And then just casually switch to ânone of the alternatives are betterâ.
Haha :) At this point I donât know why I even bother.
Yes, the alternatives to Qualcomm are so very ubiquitous in Europe that the EU fined Qualcomm a billion Euros.
You might want to rethink your argument here.
I believe I have said dozens of times that one alternative is quite substantially better: Apple.
The pertinent question is why. Everyone started from the same ARM licensed cores in 2010-ish, and Qualcomm has plenty of resources and expertise to bring to bear. Hell, Apple isnât even a CPU or chip company in the first place!
As to whether other companies are pumping out mediocre generic licensed ARM cores that offer near-identical performance to the mediocre generic licensed âcustomizedâ ARM cores that Qualcomm puts in Snapdragons, sure they are. You are telling me that Samsungâs âhomegrownâ Exynos is such a font of radical innovation that they donât bother shipping it in any device they sell in the USA?
The EU fines were about LTE baseband, not about SOCs. Do you understand that these are not the same thing? And also totally different markets (thereâs a big difference between a 90% market share vs. 40% market share).
So just to be clear, this is you admitting that your âQualcomm is a huge painful aberration to this trendâ claim is untrue, right?
Um, no. Iâm not claiming itâs a âfont of radical innovationâ. Iâm claiming that you very wrong about âthe only widely commercially available hardware you can get to run Android is Qualcommâ.
Hereâs a recent analyst report on the SOC market shares:
But of course reports like that arenât the ground truth. Are the numbers credible? Hereâs the distribution of SOCs seen by a benchmark tool in 2016. It looks reasonably consistent:
Having a discussion with you is incredibly frustrating, since you refuse to accept being wrong about anything and constantly try to switch the subject. So before I engage with any of your tangents, letâs see if we can nail down these particular issues.
Specifically, do you now agree with the following facts?
Android phones based on non-Qualcomm SOCs are widely commercially available.
Qualcommâs CPU performance isnât abnormally bad. Itâs in line with most of their competitors.
Yes, the alternatives to Qualcomm are so very ubiquitous in Europe that the EU fined Qualcomm a billion Euros.
Samsung flagships in Europe have been shipping with Exynos for years. The reason they donât use Exynos in the USA is because of CDMA, and they arenât bothered having two SKUs for the US (i.e. Snapdragon+CDMA & Exynos).
Patent licensing deals with Qualcomm are rumoured to be why Exynos chips have only ever appeared in one non-Samsung phone, with the Korean Fair Trade regulator fining it a record $850 million last year.
wumpus, you really know absolutely nothing about this topic do you?
My brotherâs 2011 Samsung Galaxy S2 had Exynos.
My 2012 Samsung Galaxy Note 2 had Exynos
My brotherâs 2014 Samsung Galaxy S4 had Exynos
My 2015 Samsung Galaxy S5 had Snapdragon as Samsung hadnât developed an LTE modem for Exynos yet
My sisterâs 2016 Samsung Galaxy S6 had Exynos
My brother in lawâs Samsung Galaxy S7 has Exynos
âhurrdurr Exynos isnât used in Europe because Iâm wumpusâ
He does not. Just like he canât separate software factors between the platforms from hardware differences (e.g. how Chrome versions can make major performance differences on identical hardware). Itâs religious at this point. He post links to his own blog as scripture.
Qualcomm paid billions of US Dollars to a key customer, Apple, so that it would not buy from rivals. These payments were not just reductions in price â they were made on the condition that Apple would exclusively use Qualcommâs baseband chipsets in all its iPhones and iPads.
So your argument is that iPhones are Qualcomm garbage, right?
So, respectively, 7% and 11% improvements from a software update to a browser running on the exact same hardware? Tell me again how this benchmark is a valid tool for measuring and comparing general CPU performance? Lol!
This doesnât necessarily invalidate Speedometer as a useful benchmark. It does mean that you need to be mindful of the browser versions in order to compare apples to apples.
And of course thereâs zero connection between âif you use our baseband chips, you must also use our SoCs, or the price mysteriously goes way upâ. Were you guys born yesterday?
How interesting that Qualcomm intervenes in this manner.
My argument is that Qualcomm is garbage. And we now have the litigation to prove it. In Korea, in Europe, and the US.
Nope. Apple uses the same licensed ARM tech, unless they have built some foundries and become a chip company since the last time I checked.
Incorrect, because one of their competitors is Apple, which uses the same ARM tech. I mean itâs possible Intelâs mobile chips would have been materially faster, but what happened to those? Oh yeah, they got qualcommed.
I will concede that none of the other ARM licensees except Apple seems to be able to bring any meaningful extra performance to the table. But the fact is they are all ARM licensees working with the same ARM tech. So again: why? Whatâs different?
Also, Iâm still waiting for your response to me showing you actual data that our Ruby tests run twice as fast on a Skylake chip as an Ivy Bridge one. Same number of cores, similar clock speeds. Because, you know, desktop CPU performance is irrelevant these days, much less mobile, right?
The article/lawsuit is literally about Qualcomm paying cash money toApple who doesnât fucking use a Qualcomm SoC. How the fuck can you twist that around to mean that they are extorting them to use an SoC that they donât use?
I was looking forward to seeing if the realization that the linked article wasnât about Qualcommâs actual SoC would sink in and whether heâd just gloss over it or double down and tell all of us, including at least one person who literally has written interface code between a non-Qualcomm microprocessor and a Qualcomm LTE chip, that we donât understand what we are talking about.
This Qualcomm is extorting Apple thing is way beyond what I could have imagined. I have to admit, I was finding this thread tiresome but I am reinvigorated.
The FTC sued Qualcomm in January, alleging the company engaged in anticompetitive tactics to maintain a monopoly on the chips that let cell phones connect to mobile data networks.]
The FTC highlighted Qualcommâs âno license, no chipsâ policy under which the San Diego company refuses to sell chips unless customers also sign a patent license agreement and pay Qualcomm fees.
But Qualcommâs patent licensing business model is under fierce attack not only in South Korea but also in the U.S., where Apple and the U.S. Fair Trade Commission have filed lawsuits claiming the company abuses its market power as a cellular modem supplier to illegally over-charge for patents.
Qualcomm has been hit with a nearly $774 million fine by Taiwanâs Fair Trade Commission, which said today that the chip maker abused its monopoly over smartphone modems to squeeze higher licensing fees and better terms out of its customers. Taiwan is only the latest country to go after Qualcomm over its expensive and onerous licensing terms: China and South Korea have both fined the company in the past two years, and Apple is now engaged in a series of global lawsuits against Qualcomm over many of the same practices.
Thereâs a lot of irony in this, of course. In the ITC claim, Intel is depicting itself as the poor victim of a mobile chip monopolist, even though it was fined $1.4 billion by the EU for abusing its own PC chip monopoly with AMD. Nevertheless, its claim to be an underdog is effectively correct: Next to Qualcomm, Intel has a pitiful share of the mobile chip market. The ITC is set to study the complaint in August, and a trial is expected sometime next year.
Wasnât it? Isnât this bundling? âBe a real shame if anything happened to the patents on those chips, but lucky for you have I got a great bundled deal just for youâŠâ I mean, letâs talk wintel, or Microsoft Office, or really any bundling scenario ever.
Qualcomm currently sells its own integrated Snapdragon chips (which bundle an Application Processor with a Baseband Processor) alongside standalone baseband âMDMâ components (like those now used by Apple)
and
Qualcommâs near-term headwinds look brutal, but the company remains the best in breed producer of mobile systems on chips, which bundle together application processors, GPUs, and baseband modems. Samsungâs use of Qualcommâs Snapdragon 835 in U.S. versions of the new Galaxy S8 indicate that the chip will probably keep powering top-tier flagship devices for the foreseeable future.
Itâs about Apple. Are you so obsessed with never admitting you could possibly be wrong that you are going to pretend now that either it wasnât about Apple or pretend that somehow Apple has been forced to use Qualcomm SoCs despite the fact that they donât?
I love how you just pivoted to patent licensing fees as if that had anything to do with the lawsuit you quoted which was about monopolistic pricing of baseband chips, not SoC technology.
You know that Apple is suing Qualcomm over SoC patents, right?
I mean, everyone is always suing everyone over themâŠ
66 on Safari 11.0.3 running on a MacBook Pro 13" (2016), 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5. Crazy to think that my iPhone X is faster (I got 79.8 - wonder why @wumpusâ iPhone X did so much better than mine?).
The FTC highlighted Qualcommâs âno license, no chipsâ policy under which the San Diego company refuses to sell chips unless customers also sign a patent license agreement and pay Qualcomm fees.
Obviously Qualcomm isnât going to sell Snapdragon chips to Apple â but the whole point is that non Apple competitors are forced to go through those baseband licenses where the forced bundling of Snapdragon happens, otherwise oops! Looks like the prices just accidentally went way up on those baseband chips you needed, pal!
Courts and regulatory bodies in the U.S. and internationally have found that Qualcomm repeatedly flouts its FRAND commitments and agreements. The most persistent complaint within the FTC action is the Qualcomm practice of âno license, no chips.â Qualcomm, the FTC says, has a pattern of withholding patent licenses unless buyers also agree to purchase its chipsets for wireless devices. For example, Qualcomm is accused of demanding a license royalty of 5% of the retail price of a device â $30 for a $600 smartphone â when a typical SEP license amounts to less than 0.5% of retail price.
So youâre telling me, thereâs no world in which Qualcomm cuts special bundling deals for companies where the Snapdragon SoCs just happens to be a super cheap deal when paired with their baseband chips⊠and by the way itâd be a real shame if those baseband patent issues came knocking?
And thatâs perhaps why we see so little real competition.
