Intel researchers put WiFi inside—the processor, that is

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/intel-researchers-put-wifi-inside-the-processor-that-is/

by thepacketrat • 14 years ago

43 20 14 years ago

arstechnica.com

stephengillie3• 14 years ago

Will CPUs access HDDs via WIFI in the near future? Will it matter if they're in the same case anymore?

wmf• 14 years ago

Wi-Fi is about 1/10th the speed of SATA, so no.

stephengillie3• 14 years ago

Do you always need maximum speed?

Someone2• 14 years ago

I think Wi-Fi will speed up faster than both SATA and disk drives, and SATA already is faster than portable hard disks.

For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ad aims at 7Gb/s. http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2012-mobile-hdd-charts/-0... gives max read speed for mobile disks at less than 1.5Gb/s.

Form that viewpoint, I can see a laptop disk drive that only needs a power connection. Battery-operated, you could even keep it in your bag while using it,

Big questions, however, are a) whether people will still want external drives for thei laptops. SSDs and the cloud may supplant them, b) whether the bandwidth is reliable enough (what if I sit next to someone who also has a Wi-Fi external drive?) and c) whether it is a wise idea to make it so easy to detach your disk. Software will have to be prepared to handle the case "user picks up laptop and walks out of range of external disk"

Especially for reasons a and b, I do not see this happen.

7952• 14 years ago

I presume that you mean block level access over wifi? Surely iSCSI already works over WiFi, if a little slowly. Why would you want to do this in preference to accessing files using NFS or HTTP?

Although if you had a stupidly fast internet connection it would be possible to hold devices images in RAM centrally and may turn out to be quicker than booting from local storage.

shimon_e• 14 years ago

One reason why it's a clear cut no: latency. Maybe for file servers but not for operating system and application files. Expect always to have a few GBs accessible by wire (even if one day it is included in the SOC).

Scene_Cast2• 14 years ago

The title is somewhat misleading. Intel developed a "processor" (digital chip) to handle WiFi. The title implies that the chip + antennas are integrated within the CPU. Sure, in the future the digital chip may end up being integrated, but this isn't major news, in my opinion.

caublestone• 14 years ago

Are you sure? Because if you were right, I don't think Intel would use money and resources to make a big announcement that they have caught up with technology that has been around for 13 years. From all other news and PR releases I've read, the wifi transceiver is integrated on the intel cpu dye. I believe you still need an antenna, but at these frequencies those are quite small (3mmx3mm inverted f).

johnl87• 14 years ago

That's exactly what they did. That's what SOC means. Basically instead of having to have a separate chip on the board for the radio, it's within the processor. Of course the board still needs an antenna, but this is just another step towards x86 cell phones.

ajb2• 14 years ago

This is basically Intel announcing that they are ready to compete in the mobile phone/tablet SoC market. The other vendors already had integrated wifi, 3G/LTE, but used ARM processors, locking out Intel.

ippisl• 14 years ago

I think that other vendors are using two chips by putting them inside one package. I don't think anybody else made the cpu and rf sections on the chip yet. also nice is that the rf is made using digital technology which benefits from moore's law.

ajb2• 14 years ago

RF and logic on the same chip is not new. See http://www.fwdconcepts.com/dsp032112.htm .

jhaglund• 14 years ago

tldr: more efficient WIFI = longer battery life

I think maybe some of you missed the part where they say:

While the back-end elements of wireless have been digitized long ago, the front end—phase modulation, frequency synthesis, and RF power amplification, for example—have largely been dependent on analog components.

The problem posed by those analog components is that while digital components can be scaled down with improvements in silicon die manufacturing, the analog parts can't—as they get smaller, they get worse, Ratter said. Yorgos Palaskas, the research leader in Intel's radio integration lab, said that because analog components generally performed much better when manufactured on a larger scale, the analog components for WiFi transceivers and cell phones "are typically made on a separate fab."

...

Some of the components already existed in a digital form, but needed to be significantly improved. Intel had digital phase modulators already that were developed for satellite and mobile communications, but they only handled enough frequency channels for 3G communications. "We needed much wider channels for WiFi, up to 40 MHz of bandwidth," Palaskas said. "It required some very creative mathematical manipulation."

nnnnni• 14 years ago

Hopefully it'll be linux-compatible...

Intel researchers put WiFi inside—the processor, that is

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