Some Arris boxes are affected, not all. I have a SB8200 which uses the Broadcom chip. Also the SB6183 is fine. The one you want to avoid is the SB6190.
The issue will absolutely show up. Just download pingplotter and set the interval to 0.3 seconds. The latest firmware simply mitigates the problem a bit, all Puma 6 chips are affected.
It's most noticeable in online games, for regular usage, you probably won't see much of a problem.
Wow that's a huge issue and I'm amazed I was totally ignorant of it until just now. Looks like my last modem upgrade happened just before Arris switched to Puma 6.
My brother recently got a free modem from his ISP with the defective puma chipset and he ended up keeping it because the defect wasn’t that noticeable.
Hmm... this is interesting. When buying a laptop, I've always looked for one with a Intel Wi-Fi chip[1], because the Broadcom and most of the Killer wireless chips have really bad Linux driver support. Maybe for PCs, Intel 's Wi-Fi chips are still the best?
The analysis that Intel’s lower peak throughput makes the iPhone 30% less efficient with spectrum stands on very shaky grounds. The effect needs to be coupled with the probability that 1gb rate is actually allocatable to a phone: which requires exceedingly favorable conditions and is therefore rare in common usage. Secondly even when peak rate is available but not utilized the impact to spectrum efficiency tends to be minimal as the unused capacity can be allocated to other users (a complete analysis is complicated as it depends on the figure of merit that carriers use). There’s no way carriers would even accept a 10% reduction in bandwidth efficiency, even from Apple.
Lots of reasons. My guess, looking from the outside and talking with some telecom engineers.
1. Intel's own Culture and Incompetence. There is a very long lead time in Semiconductor industry. What you are seeing today are likely work started 3 to 4 years ago. But even having that in mind, the sale of Infineon to Intel were completed in early 2011. It was announced and preparation ( assuming they did prepare ) in 2010. And the first Intel self Fabbed Modem? The Intel 7560 Modem, on 2018 iPhone.
2. What ever politics they had at Intel, Pat Gelsinger was out in 2009. Like I said there are 4 years of his work release after he left. That is 2013. And you can now look at what Intel has achieved in 2014 - 2019.
3. Intel Custom Foundry is a complete mess. And anything non-CPU are done on the custom foundry node. Such as Modem and Altera's FPGA. And we all know their 10nm is 2 years late, or 3 years depending on how you count them.
4. It is not IP, or technically hard to design a working LTE modem. It is extremely hard to design a modem that works well in all edge cases around the world. And if I remember correctly from the first day of Qualcomm/ Apple trial. The intel Modem were priced closer to $20, not $10 as SemiAccruate Report. Qualcomm spends lots of money in Field Testing as well as working with all Mobile Phones vendor / MNO in testing. When Qualcom has 100s of clients and design wins they get much more testing done and data than all other players on the market. There is a reason why Qualcomm has the best modem on the planet and you are only paying a slight premium for it. Its because they throw money into testing. While Intel, well I don't know what they have done in those 8 years, at least they have Apple as a client ( For a brief moment ).
While you may question how much Qualcomm charges for their Patents, ( In my opinion, not a ridiculous amount as media likes to paint that picture ). I surely would pay $20 - $30 more RSP for a quality Qualcomm Modem, than saves the money on a worse Intel Modem.
5. I have always felt there is a strong Intel Culture that makes any acquisition fail to have any synergy.
I used to work for DSP/C -- one of the first companies Intel had bought in order to enter the Cellular market (later sold to Marvell Semiconductors which, after a few years, exited the cellular market and closed the division)
There are a few objective reasons making it difficult to compete in the cellular business and a few Intel specific reasons:
- Intel's process and FABs are designed for high performance x86 chips. Not low power cellular chips. Given that the margins on x86 chips are also way higher, there was no incentive to change anything. So the cellular modems were produced using a power hungry process and were less competitive.
- At the time, Qualcomm was holding most essential patents required for implementing 3G (and probably now 4G). Licensing fees are enormous burden on anyone entering the market.
- Cellular technology undergoes tons of tests by operators, handset manufacturers, base station equipment manufacturers. It takes a lot of effort (and manpower) to execute all these tests and make the required modifications. It doesn't help that the reference platform is Qualcommm. So if you had made different a different tradeoff than Qualcomm, you may do better in some tests but will have to make fixes for other tests.
- Some problems are only seen in the field and only in certain places (due to quirky base station equipment, non standard deployment, etc.) Again, it takes a lot of effort to detect and fix those issues.
- Qualcomm (The big incumbent in this business) is huge: over 30,000 employees. No way you can compete if all you have is about a 1000-engineers in your cellular division.
By the way, the only successful cellular maker I'm aware of besides Qualcomm is MediaTek (Taiwan) which:
- Concentrates on the low end market.
- Ships complete solutions. You can find lots of different phones which are essentially a single MTK design with very few modifications.
>- At the time, Qualcomm was holding most essential patents required for implementing 3G (and probably now 4G). Licensing fees are enormous burden on anyone entering the market.
From what I know, you don't need any licensing to design and implement a 3G/4G/ or even 5G Modem. ( Unless you want CDMA Support ) It is the ODM or Phone Manufactures that has to take care of it. Much like you don't need a license to include H.264 decoder, not even to ship it. But you will need to pay if you decide to enable it.
>only successful cellular maker I'm aware of besides Qualcomm is MediaTek
Mediatek is awesome. By concentrating on low end, something Qualcomm doesn't want to do, they have an economy of scale for both Fabs Capacity, Design and Modem testing.
And just a note, Huawei, assuming they will Settle with Qualcomm, and Samsung both have their own Modem Implementation. These two represent close to 40% of market. And if you include Apple down the line, that is roughly 55%. Adding Mediatek, that is close to 70%. And that is excluding BBK and Xiamoi plans to make their own modem, together they represent 15% to 20%. Qualcomm doesn't have a monopoly as media likes to paint it.
Not sure about Huawei, but Samsung is not using their own modem in all of the phones they make. I'm not sure what % but they do use Qualcomm's modem in at least some of the models.
3G is based on CDMA technology (wideband CDMA) and does require licensing fees. It doesn't really matter whether the chip manufacturer or the phone maker pays the fees. The end result is that non-Qualcomm chips make the product more expensive (and Qualcomm gets stronger anyway due to licensing fees).
>Not sure about Huawei, but Samsung is not using their own modem in all of the phones they make. I'm not sure what % but they do use Qualcomm's modem in at least some of the models.
That was before the settlement, and Samsung needed Qualcomm to access market with Network that was built on CDMA2000 ( Verizon ) going forward Samsung will likely be expanding their SoC across their product line.
>3G is based on CDMA technology (wideband CDMA)
The CDMA in reference were CDMA owned by Qualcomm or CDMA 2000, WCDMA and the China version of TDS-CDMA has cross patents agreement with other W-CDMA vendors.
My guess is that it's mostly IP-related. You can't use any of Qualcomm's patents when designing a modem, and they have a ton of modem-related patents, including lots of the "common sense" solutions anyone would discover while developing a modem. Hence, you have to develop a modem with two arms tied behind your back which is quite difficult.
What? I thought the LTE spec had certain required technologies that were patented and supposed to be licensed for a reasonable fee, and QC just got in trouble for tying those licenses to chip sales.
There were a lot of reported issues with Qualcomm licensing for standards essential patents. In particular they weren’t necessarily abiding by FRAND rules.
Saying publicly "our modems are bad because..." is probably not a great way to sell more modems.
Once they're out of the business, they have no incentive to say why, they just focus on other things.
Since Intel has not always played fair against AMD, they don't really want to talk about anticompetitive business practices in a market they're exiting anyhow.
The structure of intel creates a culture pits teams against each other. It doesn’t foster collaboration. My guess is that middle management rebelled whenever Intel was trying to be strategic in their roadmaps/acquisitions. Imagine trying to pivot a company in such a toxic environment.
When Intel announced they were closing the division immediately after Apple’s settlement, I just assumed the whole point of Intel being in the market was to give Apple some leverage over Qualcomm. Possibly in return for delaying the Mac switchover to ARM a few years.
“On top of this the Intel modems consumed vastly more energy to do their slower work than Qualcomm, a trend that SemiAccurate has personally measured in the labs across multiple generations of Intel modems but is not at liberty to disclose exact figures on, sorry.”
Why not? Presumably they would be opening themselves up to some liability?
A guess -- they do market intelligence on contract, and the customer that paid for the work (competitors, large investors trying to figure out bets on qualcomm, etc) didn't agree to have the data shared.
As soon as I loaded the page and glanced that "lookie here it's real!" tone of the photos I resolved to Photoshop some goofy something onto an Intel chip as a joke. IMAGINE MY SURPRISE when the article turned out to feature photo fakery!
Echoes of Risc & VLIW: i432AX, i80860, i80960, Itanic… Intel killed its good non-x86 products, coincidentally all grown out of itself: DEC Alpha, the StrongARM. SSD quality is a joke. The Register must be having a field day too.
Huawei, Samsung, Mediatek, Unisoc ( Spreadtrum ), Intel and Apple in the future.
If you exclude Unisoc and Intel, the other could represent a total of up to 70% Smartphone Market. That is assuming Mediatek continues to dominate the lower end, and the top 3 vendor, Samsung, Huawei, Apple's market share are stable.
There are quite a few other players focusing on M2M LTE solution.
Intel laid off most of their CPU designers 5 years ago. That's when their CPUs became frozen in time and it's when the marketing morons took over the executive boardroom. It is well known that they are mostly a semiconductor physics shop and don't have a clue about how to design circuits or software. The challenge of making a good modem is mostly in the handoff software (most calls are in some sort of handoff most of the time) and software is the Intel Achilles Heel.
That’s a lot of big claims with nary a citation in sight. Their software might not be consistently amazing (you might want to demonstrate that you understand how many different things they work on) but it’s not clueless and I’d especially want to see support for the idea that they don’t know how to design circuits. I mean, AMD is competitive now but they sure seem to be working hard at it – are they clueless too?
'Scuse me? As much as I like AMD more, Intel is pretty competent:
They design motherboards, and share their designs with their OEM's- much like reference GPU's.
They (via acquisition) have some of the better wired NIC's on the market (their features for sure beat Realtek's, and are more or less on par with Mellanox's.)
[Intel doesn't] have a clue about how to design circuits or software.
Them managing to even produce a single CPU and have it work would disprove that.
https://www.badmodems.com/
I'm also an unfortunate owner of an Arris box. If only the person who showed me this website could have done it a few years ago...