LTE is rapidly becoming a big market in China, where Huawei is from, so it’s no surprise that they intend to adopt the latest LTE technology (Cat 6) into their chips as soon as possible, and not let competitors like Qualcomm take too much of the market before they do. Huawei is also selling a lot of phones itself, so all the more reason to have their own chips with integrated LTE, so they don’t have to buy it from other companies.
Huawei wants to adopt the latest LTE cat 6 in their next-gen K3V3 chip (K3V2 successor), according to a new report, which should put speeds up to 300 Mbps, which is twice as much as the current LTE-A Cat 4 at 150 Mbps. LTE should reach speeds up to 1 Gbps, so we should keep seeing chip makers adopt LTE technology that support higher throughput. Huawei is also working on a new “5G” technology, that should reach up to 10 Gbps, but we won’t be seeing that until 2020 or so.
Of course the problem today with mobile data is not so much how fast it is, but how much of it you’re allowed to use for a reasonable price. But hopefully that will evolve at a pace that’s just as fast as the rate at which LTE is improving.
Huawei’s K3V3 chip, besides having this LTE cat 6 modem, will also come with an 8-core CPU, which seems to be all the rage now, at least according to OEMs and chip makers who seem to believe that more cores = more sales. Personally, I’d much rather see they focused on moving their chips to the ARMv8 architecture as soon as possible, than move to 8-cores.
There may be a time when 8-core chips will start to make sense in a mobile smartphone, but I don’t think we’re there yet, and we’d all benefit if we moved on to the 64-bit architecture faster, because the faster we’re all on 64-bit chips, the faster chip makers can discard the 32-bit support from these chips, which should make them less expensive and more efficient, too.