This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this page. Terms of utilise.

472039-top iphone x

The already acrimonious fight between Apple and Qualcomm got even uglier today. The two companies have been slugging it out for years over a range of issues related to royalty payments and fees — Apple'south decision to deploy Intel modems in its iPhones is seen as a desire to move abroad from Qualcomm. There are parallels betwixt the Apple-Qualcomm relationship and the Apple tree-Samsung fights of several years ago, but the Apple-Qualcomm battle has been uglier. Now, Qualcomm has accused Apple of stealing trade secrets and sharing them with Intel to assistance get Chipzilla'due south modem engineering fix for the iPhone.

The charge of stealing corporate secrets is potentially explosive. These types of theft are treated extremely seriously in technology because they have the risk of ruining years, even decades of work that companies do to bring long-term projects to market. Imagine the impairment to Intel, for example, if some vital function of a CPU is found to have been stolen from a competitor. That competitor would exist well within their rights to asking that the office is pulled from the market until it can be redesigned. Other companies, fearing revenge from the infringed-upon party, might refuse to deport the competitor's part. Merchandise secret theft issues were raised betwixt both Intel and AMD and AMD and Nvidia in 2008 and 2022, respectively, and in both cases, you don't see the rival company making a audio in protest. While there have obviously been exceptions and corporate espionage is A Thing, companies more often than not don't desire to go so far every bit incorporating IP from another visitor into their products.

ModemPerf23

Intel operation has lagged behind Qualcomm but the gap appeared to be closing.

According to Qualcomm, it was prevented from conducting an audit on Apple's use of source code and tools provided by Qualcomm for the purposes of iPhone development. It claims to have discovered this trade secret theft later on discovery in a related lawsuit allowed it to unearth bear witness that confidential data was improperly provided to Intel for the purposes of improving Intel modems and functioning. We've written before that the Qualcomm modem solution was more often than not superior to the Intel one in the Apple tree iPhone, that the situation improved from 2022 to 2022, just that Apple tree really disabled certain features on its handsets to ensure parity between devices outfitted with each. Despite this, Intel modems even so lagged Qualcomm performance in 2022.

Nosotros haven't seen any figures for this yr yet, but the assumption was that the improvements from 2022-2017 reflected Intel's growing expertise in the field and improvements to its silicon. They all the same could. Allegations, after all, are non the same as proven facts. But if Apple really stole trade secrets from Qualcomm and gave them to Intel, it could open a massive legal ball of worms that could bear upon Intel's modem business going forrad, depending on the specifics of what was taken and whether Intel is directly implicated in the theft. Apple tree, of grade, steadfastly denies that any breach of agreement or inappropriate information sharing has occurred.

At present Read: Apple'southward Next iPhone May Ditch Qualcomm Altogether, iPhone 10 Modem Testing Shows Qualcomm Beating Intel, and Non All iPhone Xs Use the Same Modem, and They Perform Differently