Essentially, Qualcomm couldn’t get anyone to use their proprietary protocol that probably requires Qualcomm hardware and definitely requires royalty payment to Qualcomm.
I wonder why no OEM would want to be locked to Qualcomm and pay Qualcomm more.
someone was recently telling me that in a previous life qualcomm was consistently the worst company they had to work with and that they quote “never missed a chance to twist the knife”, both financially and also just with routine incompetence.
this was after the story of qualcomm suicide-bombing their new ARM desktop processors’ launch by bundling a high-power high-performance SOC with phone-tier power ICs that required ganging multiple of them together (since qualcomm didn’t have a proper laptop SOC, but wouldn’t miss the chance to bundle a sale of something) and since they were phone ICs they had high-density bumpout that required a super expensive PCB. Oh and partners couldn’t even just throw away the power ICs because they were DRM’d to the processor… even apple doesn’t do that lol.
Yeah, the reason Google is promising 7 years of software updates on the new Pixels is they’re no longer beholden to Qualcomm providing security updates to all their proprietary drivers. Qualcomm charged exorbitant fees for updates past a couple years and did a half-ass job of it.
Man, I used to work on set top boxes and Broadcom had a similarly dominant market share for a while there. And they were also a nightmare to work with. Ironically Broadcom (well, the renamed parent company that bought them) tried to buy Qualcomm a few years ago. Luckily it failed…
Essentially, Qualcomm couldn’t get anyone to use their proprietary protocol that probably requires Qualcomm hardware and definitely requires royalty payment to Qualcomm.
I wonder why no OEM would want to be locked to Qualcomm and pay Qualcomm more.
someone was recently telling me that in a previous life qualcomm was consistently the worst company they had to work with and that they quote “never missed a chance to twist the knife”, both financially and also just with routine incompetence.
this was after the story of qualcomm suicide-bombing their new ARM desktop processors’ launch by bundling a high-power high-performance SOC with phone-tier power ICs that required ganging multiple of them together (since qualcomm didn’t have a proper laptop SOC, but wouldn’t miss the chance to bundle a sale of something) and since they were phone ICs they had high-density bumpout that required a super expensive PCB. Oh and partners couldn’t even just throw away the power ICs because they were DRM’d to the processor… even apple doesn’t do that lol.
https://semiaccurate.com/2023/09/26/whats-going-on-with-qualcomms-oryon-soc/
Yeah, the reason Google is promising 7 years of software updates on the new Pixels is they’re no longer beholden to Qualcomm providing security updates to all their proprietary drivers. Qualcomm charged exorbitant fees for updates past a couple years and did a half-ass job of it.
So basically Qualcomm is the Oracle of the hardware world.
Man, I used to work on set top boxes and Broadcom had a similarly dominant market share for a while there. And they were also a nightmare to work with. Ironically Broadcom (well, the renamed parent company that bought them) tried to buy Qualcomm a few years ago. Luckily it failed…