Reading the spec sheet on it has me feeling in awe for the antenna designer. This chipset claims to be able to simultaneously tune in on 850 / 900 / 1500 / 1700 / 1800 / 1900 / 2200 / 2800 / 3500 / 5000mhz. Having gone through the “black art” of antenna design just for a few of those frequencies before, I can’t imagine trying to cover all of them well, but I also know if anyone does it well, it’s XX’s team (not outing the person as I don’t know if it’s well known who leads that team at Apple).
they're not standard ELF files, more likely they're using the ELF format just to have a list of "load address-size-data" stuff assembled with some custom linker script, and they did not bother to change it, probably because of integrity checks or sanity checks along the assembly line
would have been much more fun if they switched to PE format though, like they did with EFI/UEFI :D
oh not really, as I already said, Intel basebands were ARM cpu...iPhone was using the Hexagon platform only for CDMA versions, you can check it by downloading a random ipsw from previous years iPhone models
they were Hexagon only just for few models (iPhone 5 and 5s I think), before that, they were using the Infineon baseband, which guess what...it's what Intel bought :)
btw, for the last 10+ basebands were mostly ARMs, with very few exceptions (the already mentioned Hexagon), check also Mediatek and Huawei basebands
and yes, I don't like having an x86 as an embedded CPU, but that's my problem, I guess...
obviously you're not into baseband reversing, otherwise you would have known that for the past 10+ years, basebands were almost always RISC cpu and almost always ARM...
moreover, all previous iterations of Intel basebands were custom ARM cores based around Infineon IP acquired by Intel to be competitive in the baseband market...you did not even read my document, because I said this about the old baseband version
moreover, by the nature of baseband itself, it requires a CPU capable of real-time or near real-time processing, as a matter of fact other vendors are using Cortex-R CPU, which is an ARM cpu made for real-time os, giving you predictable timings, especially interrupt processing and memory access
for example, Cortex-R gives you a special kind of memory, called TCM (Tightly-Coupled Memory) memory, which gives you predictable memory access timings, something that you cannot obtain with a simple cache
by the way, Cortex-R is also used in WiFi chipsets, because the type of processing required is very similar (check the excellent writeup done by Google's Project Zero about this)
so yes, it is interesting to see how Intel managed to implement this kind of features in an x86 CPU, which was never designed for such kind of requirements
I suggest you take a look at the References in my document, they might provide some useful information on the matter
of course if you're not interested in baseband reversing, then I guess you're right, it's not technically interesting material
