Wall Street Journal:
A deal, covering a portfolio of patents and staff valued at $1 billion or more, could be reached in the next week, the people said—assuming the talks don’t fall apart.
And:
It would give Apple access to engineering work and talent behind Intel’s yearslong push to develop modem chips for the crucial next generation of wireless technology known as 5G, potentially saving years of development work.
There’s long been talk that Qualcomm modems are better performing, especially in poor signal areas, than Intel’s modems. To get a sense of the more recent state of affairs, take a look at the charts in this PCMag article.
Not all roses, but you can see that Intel’s modems have definitely made great strides since the days of the iPhone X.
While 5G modems will certainly be the new hotness, LTE performance will still matter much more in the real world, especially when you are on the road, away from any 5G sweet spots that emerge.
And it’s not like Apple can’t take silicon and improve it, probably at least as well as Qualcomm can, especially in the long run.
(AFAIK the best performing ARM chipsets in the world are Apple’s, no?)
Sort of the other way around: ARM makes the chips for Apple (to their spec). Also, very different chipsets… Qualcomm seems to have the secret sauce when it comes to wireless broadband, so it’s very apples and oranges (no pun intended).