Given 5G/6G future biz opportunities , selling our modem division is a very bad decision. We spend billons to develop technology ans sold it for peanuts. Bad decision from our mgmt
14 replies (most recent on top)
If they had focused on in-house manufacturing, but they didn't, and the ship has sailed. Bringing it back wouldn't make sense at all.
Intel did great decision to sell iCDG. Like some people said, that was a non-profit. Always late to the game in supporting 3GPP features. Sometimes even the KPIs are not competitive enough. So, iCDG was always falling behind other competition modems.
Now question is who was at the fault?
The people driving the architecture, execution could not catch up with the delivery cadence. Most of the control almost always with senior staffs of Infineon. Infineon never worked towards company's one goal. It is always credit demand from several teams fighting each other. That's what happens if you make sub-standard product.
Why do we worry, it's Apple's headache now. Just relax and enjoy the show
If fruit company still relying on Germans, they will make sure they bring down fruit company's market credibility. Germans are not good in execution.
@2osk+1adQTVGS + @2rff+1adQTVGS, you guy's obviously have no clue, There is no reason to b–ch about the Germans here. So let me educate you ..
Germany has not been involved in modem baseband design since 2005. At this point in time the design team got closed and the activity transferred to China where it stayed almost till the end. (shortly before the end Murthy decided to ship the design to Bangalore.) Germany has been RF design and the same team was taken over by Apple. The baseband design team itself got fired .. The US Management team made it to Apple somehow ..
The mistake the German team made early on was believing baseband design is easy, basically shipping it from one low cost geo to another ... no German was involved in actual design / concept activities anymore ..
@2osk+1adQTVGS. You nailed it. When Intel first bought Infineon in 2010/11 they were already 2-3 years behind their competitors. When they eventually developed their 3G modem into 4G, they continued to use the polar architecture which does not work well for MIMO. The arrogant but incompetent German team only knows how to blame the US management for their failure.
Infineon didn’t even 4G. It was a loser group. Come on. Fortunately, they had TMG to blame for their failures..after years of losing multiple billions of dollars a year, they manage to develop a 4G modem worse than competition. It was only because of apple’s contentious relationship with Qualcomm that they were able to sell. Come on. Who are you kidding.
We know iCDG very well. We don’t need fictions.
Intel can't do business where a chipset sells for 10$ and a yearly cadence is expected.
The iCDG team actually delivered on the required cadence for a couple of years when it was allowed to work with TSMC, ARM and their Inway design flow.
Once they were forced to move to HDK, X86 and Intel 14 nm this became a major burden and the whole group collapsed ...
ICDG was a horrible organization. First, it was Aicha Evans and her friends. Then it was run by Murthy’s bad hires - cormac, Messay, etc. thank God, they are gone. Most of them are apple’s problem. Don’t believe that Apple is hiring Intel’s best all the time.
Some of the iCDG people are still around in the next gen standard org and others. Hopefully, intel will remove them.
Intel has never made money where it didn’t have some monopoly.
Modems, and things like that cost intel billions.
x86 will soon be like that as AMD and Apple ARM will eat them soon
Did Apple buy the business? If Apple is happy with them, why do they want to be back?
Bob’s best two decisions as CEO were getting rid of horrible failures before they caused even more damage. One was the 5G modem business, and the other was Murthy.
modem is a non-profit business
Intel clearly does not benefit by selling modem alone. If Intel made Application Processor for phone is competitive enough, them modem can be added as a bundle
but stand-alone modem is so-cheap in ASP and Intel would never made it to the profit margin it desired as the company manufacturing cost is not build for low cost products
Why do you feel this way OP ? What business opportunities that you see which they didnt see before ?