One of the most interesting components in the iPhone 17 is something most of us won't even know is there. It's an engineering marvel — and very bad news for Broadcom.
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That component is N1. Apple's first in-house chip for WiFi, Bluetooth, and smart home connectivity, it replaces the Broadcom chips the company has relied on until now.
The chip transmits and receives data across a 160MHz band — exactly half the bandwidth of today's flagship chips, which operate at 320MHz. And yet, in performance benchmarks, it outperforms them in the majority of everyday use cases.
How is that possible?
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The device's main processor runs at very high frequencies (in the gigahertz range), generating a great deal of static noise. That noise can interfere with the communications chip, which needs to pick up weak wireless signals with high sensitivity.
For this reason, the communications chip is physically separated from the main processor, with isolation between them.
Whenever data arrives from the network, the chip wakes the main processor and passes it the received message for processing.
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The N1 chip was designed from the ground up in a fundamentally different way from traditional communications chips.
First, Apple made a deliberate choice to use only 160MHz.
The logic stems from the fact that the power a chip receives is limited (including by regulation) and is distributed evenly across all frequencies in the band. The narrower the band, the stronger the signals become and the more resistant they are to noise.
Although a wider band can theoretically carry more data, it consumes far more power, receives weak signals less effectively, and suffers from higher noise.
The communications chip itself has become a mini-processor.
It is manufactured on a 4-nanometer process — an expensive architecture normally reserved for CPUs — which produces low static noise and enables it to detect weak wireless signals.
The chip's processing capabilities are used to offload work from the main processor.
It can filter the stream of incoming messages and determine which ones require the main processor's attention, forwarding only those for processing.
In this way, the main processor — the more power-hungry of the two — is not activated unless it's actually needed.
This approach is made possible by a direct interface between the chip and the main processor, both of which are designed by Apple, allowing them to manage the exchange of data between them intelligently.
The N1 chip can also determine location using the WiFi network rather than relying on GPS, which consumes significantly more resources. The location fix is less precise, but in many cases that's perfectly sufficient.
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After Intel lost Apple as a major customer following the development of Apple Silicon, it is now Broadcom's turn to lose Apple as a primary client.
Next in line will likely be Qualcomm, which manufactures Apple's 5G chips — with Apple's new C1 chip (first introduced in the iPhone 16e) expected to replace it before long.
Apple's profit margins will climb as it relies increasingly on in-house component manufacturing, end users will enjoy a significant boost in performance, and the biggest losers will be the component makers left behind.
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👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss — follow me for more content on science and technology.