The latest release of KGI’s forecast for the 2018 iPhone is that they expect next year the iPhone will be equipped with quasi-5G baseband chips that deliver faster speeds. Intel chips will account for 70% to 80% of the chips, while the remaining chips will come from Qualcomm.
iPhone Intel
However, according to 9to5Mac report, KGI Securities report did not mention the specific iPhone baseband chip that will be used the next year. It just mentioned that there will be a quasi-5G-level wireless chipset, and only mentioned the use of 4 × 4 MIMO technology which will replace the current 2 × 2 MIMO technology only.
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Intel and Qualcomm’s baseband have differences in performance. Intel has just released two days ago the XMM 7660 LTE modem, which will provide LTE Cat-19 features to support the highest 1.6 Gbps download speeds per second. In contrast, Qualcomm next X20 modems bring Cat-18 speeds of up to 1.2 Gbps.
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It looks like Intel is slowly starting to take a lead over Qualcomm, and the internet has begun to see that, but taking into account the specific commercial time, is a completely different situation. Because the current Qualcomm Snapdragon X20 processor has begun to sample, in the first half of 2018 we can see the related products. And according to official sources, Intel’s XMM 7660 will not be commercially available until 2019, and by that time, the XMM 7660 will have to face a more powerful Qualcomm X50 modem by that time last month and would have successfully implemented the world’s first officially released 5G data connection, delivering up to 5 Gbps downstream-twice as fast as the XMM 7660. It can be said that Intel has been fast in this area, but compared to Qualcomm is still a gap.
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And the future may be a more complex pattern, KGI Securities report reiterated that Apple will use its own research and development of baseband chips in the future, they may be from another chip maker MediaTek cooperation to obtain the baseband chip source code to reduce the dependence on Intel and Qualcomm. On the other hand, to develop its own baseband chip also helps Apple control iPhone production costs.
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This is not without precedent. iPhone has used chips from Samsung in the past. After the iPhone 4, Apple began to use its own A4 processor development and iteration and came up with astonishing results. In addition to using the first 64-bit mobile chip, A7, on the iPhone 5s in 2013, Apple’s chips have been updated at a much higher rate than other processors in recent years.
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In addition to the baseband chip, KGI earlier this week also predicted the screen specifications of next year’s iPhone. After the existing 5.8-inch screen, the phone will ill also add a 6.5-inch OLED screen with iPhone ( Similar to the iPhone X Plus), and an iPhone with a 6.1-inch LCD screen.However, there are also points of view that this does not seem like Apple’s style.
