One of the first 20nm chips that we actually cared about is the Gobi 9x35 LTE Advanced Cat 6 modem, capable of achieving hitting the magical 300Mbps mark, has been shipping since Q2 2013 and is available in the Samsung Galaxy S5 Broadband LTE-A in Korea.
Korea is the first country to have an LTE Advanced Cat 6 network with speeds up to 300Mbps and we Qualcomm informed us that more countries and more devices are coming soon.
Qualcomm said that its new Snapdragon 808 and 810 32- and 64-bit chips are coming in the first half of 2015 and there is no indication that any other mobile chipmaker will ship 20nm parts this year. It is just Apple for now.
20nm 9X35 is power efficient
As you can imagine 20nm-based 9x35 Gobi Cat 6 modems are more power efficient than the older 28nm parts and naturally they need less power. At the same time older 28nm Gobi chips are probably a tad cheaper and they can reach the speeds of 150 Mbps, which is good enough for almost all markets, as faster services are not available yet.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 Broadband LTE-A is also powered by the Snapdragon 805 SoC and Gobi 9x35 LTE Advanced Cat 6 modem combo. It turns out that LG G3 Cat 6, Samsung Galaxy Note 4 LTE Cat 6 and Samsung Galaxy Note Edge are using the same combo, so there will be at least a few 300Mbps-capable phones in time for the holiday season.
iPhone 6 using 28nm MDM9625
This made us wonder about Apple’s strategy. iFixit, a bunch of amazing guys who know how to gut any gadget and show the world what is inside it, has discovered something quite interesting about the iPhone 6 LTE modem. We were surprised to see that the iPhone 6 has the Qualcomm MDM9625M LTE modem, which is a 28nm chip. This chip has been shipping since 2011 and supports LTE Category 4, offering up to 150 Mbps downlink data rates and 50 Mbps uplink data rates.
As you can imagine a 20nm 300Mbps modem chip would be a better choice, but Apple decided against it. We won't go any deeper than that but just imagine, its biggest competitor has two phones with much faster LTE-A. High-speed Cat 6 LTE will work in only a few countries including Hong Kong (China), Philippines, Singapore and South Korea.
In Europe Czech Republic, Estonia, Holland, Rumania, Russia, Spain Switzerland and UK apparently have some sort of Cat 6 network. Australia has a Cat 6 network while the Middle East, Africa and the Americas do not have Cat 6 networks.
When it comes to any kind of high end phone and LTE, Qualcomm is the clear winner with MediaTek having some serious catching up to do. Nvidia, Intel and Marvell have a tiny share in the LTE market, while Broadcom wants to get out.
