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Unlike Android handset manufacturers, which sometimes deploy different SoCs in identically named products depending on the market, Apple has historically stuck with a unified iPhone blueprint. In 2022, the visitor started using ii different modems, i from Qualcomm, one from Intel. Apple has continued this do with the iPhone X, and while the data is preliminary, evidence suggests that the Intel and Qualcomm modems still offer dissimilar performance. The ranking, even so, may accept inverse.

A year ago, Qualcomm was the undisputed winner of the Intel-versus-Qualcomm silicon match-upwardly. As the graph beneath illustrates, Intel'south XMM7360 could only continue pace with Qualcomm when signal strengths were very good. Every bit signal strength fell, the gap betwixt the two modems widened.

Band4-1024x682The iPhone Ten has merely been out for a few weeks, and then initial data is low. The company releasing the comparison, SpeedSmart, acknowledges that current sample information is limited and not controlled for wireless connectedness strength or the LTE band being used. That said, the data on the iPhone X points the reverse management from the iPhone 7:

On AT&T, the gap is pocket-size; Intel is roughly ix percent faster in download and iii percent faster in uploads. On T-Mobile, Intel surges ahead by a comparative mile, with DL functioning that's one.26x faster and uploads a whopping i.46x faster. Now, as we've said, these figures could be tilted based on where their owners live — with the iPhone X having been in marketplace for then little time, it'southward entirely possible that a random initial distribution happens to favor 1 modem over another. But the T-Mobile performance differences, in particular, are large plenty that it may brand sense to try and preferentially find the Intel modem as opposed to the Qualcomm one. (Good luck if you try to practice this, given Apple doesn't exactly annunciate them as two different versions of the same product.)

Qualcomm's performance may be handicapped by Apple tree's decision to disable certain features on the iPhone X, as BGR points out. Unlike many of its competitors, the iPhone X is limited to LTE-A (LTE Advanced) rather than Gigabit LTE. This was a deliberate design decision by Apple to ensure the Intel and Qualcomm fries ran every bit fast, though information technology may accept inadvertently disabled some features that decisively favor one baseband provider over the other on certain networks.

We'll know more on this when the iPhone X has been in-market longer and put through its paces more rigorously. For now, unless you're a T-Mobile client, we'd say the divergence between the two solutions is pretty small. Information technology is possible, yet, that these results volition also vary depending on signal strength, which would flip an advantage back to Qualcomm.

Now read: PCMag's Fastest Mobile Networks 2022