Apple To Buy 5G Chips From Qualcomm Until 2026 Under a New Deal

Emily Lawson — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 12:55:54 +0000

Qualcomm on Monday (11 September) announced a new deal with big tech Apple to supply Snapdragon 5G Modem‑RF Systems until 2026. This is a golden opportunity for Qualcomm as Apple is facing increasing challenges in China and will want to reinforce its supply chain elsewhere.

This agreement is worth billions of dollars for Qualcomm at least for the next three years. It mildly indicates that the iPhone maker is not rushing out its own modem. However, Apple moved all the computers to the M3 processing chips of their own design.

Rising Stock Prices Amid the Renewed Partnership

Qualcomm investors had a soaring start to the week as the stock prices were up as much as 9.29% in the pre-market session on Monday. By late morning, the stock had given up some of its gains and was still 3% high, and in the early afternoon, the shares were up 4%.

On the other hand, Apple’s stock price fell 6% in the last week. With the Qualcomm deal, the stock price was up 0.4%. It will be noteworthy to see the jump in Apple’s stock in the midst of its new iPhone launch and China banning the iPhone in the workplace.

Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown said, “At a time when Apple is running into increasing challenges in China, reinforcing its supply chains elsewhere is a priority, and it appears the company is rolling back or at least delaying plans to go at it alone in more areas with its chip production.”

The 2019 Chip Supply Deal

San Diego-based Qualcomm signed a chip supply deal previously in 2019 with Apple, after the settlement of a protracted legal clash between the two companies. This heated legal battle was over the patent which then forced the tech giant to settle outside of the court.

The basis of the suit was Apple bought modem chips from Qualcomm for the iPhones. However, these chips had patented technology and the chipmaker charged Apple for the chips and a separate license fee for the use of patented technology. Apple opposed it and called it ‘double dipping’. Qualcomm accused Apple of blackmailing and refused to sell the chips. Both the companies decided to fight it all the way and it started a multi-billion-dollar trial which on day one unexpectedly ended when both companies reached an out-of-court settlement.

Final Words

The patent licensing deal Qualcomm signed with Apple in 2019 will remain in place. This deal will expire in 2025 and the companies have the option to extend it for another two years.

Qualcomm said on Monday that its financial projections presume that only a fifth of the iPhones will have its chips by 2026. It is notable that Qualcomm made a similar projection in 2021 about its business with Apple which turned out overly conservative as the iPhone 14 models released last year all had Qualcomm modems.

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Can MediaTek’s Dimensity 9000+ Flagship Chipset be a good alternative to Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1?

Anwesha Mishra — Wed, 22 Jun 2022 13:57:56 +0000

On 22 June 2022, MediaTek announced its new Dimensity 9000+ chip in the market for its flagship phones. Following the footsteps of Qualcomm in reinvigorating its flagship Snapdragon processors, MediaTek takes a new bounce in launching a mid-cycle successor to its 2022 flagship chipset—the Dimensity 9000. The impending question here is whether the Dimensity 9000+ succeeds Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8-series in the killer flagship chipset race?

What’s new with Dimensity 9000+?

In recent years, Qualcomm has been renovating its flagship chipset, Snapdragon. With similar moves, the Dimensity 9000+ succeeds but unlike Qualcomm, the new chip does not include much improvements over its predecessor.

Following are some key features of the latest flagship chipset:

As compared to its predecessor, the Dimensity 9000+ SoC integrates the ARM v9 CPU architecture.
It is based on a 4nm process and combines one ultra-Cirtex-X2 core operating at up to 3.2 GHz. Additionally, it has three super Cortex-A710 cores and four efficiency Cortex-A510 cores. The only ‘plus’ in the Dimensity flagship is the new CPU architecture and ARM Mali-G710 MC10 GPU built into the new chipset, offering more than a 5% boost in CPU performance and more than a 10% improvement in GPU performance. And those are the minor boosts in the chipset.
The chipset integrates MediaTek’s 5th generation Application Processor Unit (APU 5.0) for powerful AI computing capabilities.
The Dimensity 9000+ features the same old MediaTek Imagiq 790 18-bit HDR-ISP supports 320MP, as well as simultaneous triple camera 18-bit HDR video recording.
The 9Gpixel/s ISP also supports 4K HDR Video + AI noise reduction that enables the highest quality results even in extreme low-light scenarios.

Does MediaTek actually justify the ‘+’?

The major (probably the only) difference between the Dimensity 9000+ and Dimensity 9000 is a higher-clocked prime core in the chipset, which the company says will offer a boost in performance. That’s a new 3.2GHz Cortex X2 core compared to a 3GHz Cortex X2 core on the Dimensity 9000.

The rest of the chipset has no changes compared to the older chip. We still have three Cortex A710 cores at 2.85Ghz and four Cortex A510 cores at 1.8GHz (although MediaTek hasn’t confirmed the clock speed of the A510 cores for the Dimensity 9000+ yet).

Both chipsets come with the Arm Mali-G710 MC10 GPU and support up to 180Hz at FHD+ resolution and 144Hz at WQHD+ resolution. Support for LPDDR5X RAM up to 7500Mbps is also still here and so is the 5th Gen 590 AI processing unit.

Is it a new alternative to Snapdragon 8-series?

Although MediaTek has said that phones featuring the new Dimensity 9000+ chip will hit the market in Q3 2022, it refrained from naming any phone makers who will be using the chipset. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8-series chipsets still remain the more popular chipsets in flagship Android phones across brands and it remains to be seen if the Dimensity 9000+ will change that in the coming months.

Dimensity 9000+ shows the potential of being a high-performance and top-notch chipset. In fact, it can potentially be one of the best alternatives for Qualcomm 8+ Gen 1 chipsets as it has identical specs.

Anwesha Mishra

Anwesha has been a creative writer for a while. Currently, on her pursuit of tech writing, she is diving into the realms of technology to produce better content on the forever-changing world of technology. In her free time, you’ll find her humming tunes of her favourite shows or reading a book.

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