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Intel Putting Wi-Fi into Future Chipsets
Ridgelift writes "Wired's got the story on Intel's plan to incorporate Wi-Fi into the motherboard chipset. "The chipset, however, will not include an actual Wi-Fi radio, so users will still need a wireless add-on card. Intel has said it eventually intends build a Wi-Fi radio into its microprocessors." This would make setting up a wireless network a lot simpler."
The reason why Intel probably don't want to integrate the Micoprocessor with the actual WiFi transmitter and receiver is quite simple. If they add it inside the IC, they will have to go through radio use approval for every different potential market in the world, before they sell a single component. By letting the motherboard/add on card manufacturer's do this instead, they can concentrate on developing better microprocessors.
As somebody in the know, I do worry that these new WiFi enabled equipment could be the next mobile phone when it come to interference of avionic systems; especially as many modern microprocessors are prone to soft faults at altitude due to the effects of the upper atmosphere.
I'm all for WiFi everywhere, but it sounds like a pretty big backdoor to me, I don't think I'd want to have a WiFi connection built onto my board that I couldn't disable with anything mroe then software. Next thing you would know Microsooft is using it to send DRM related information or usage stastics without you knowing.
I realize that it would probably able to be disabled in BIOS, but it wouldn't take much that if M$ wanted to take control they could do it with a few sentences in the EULA.
Improbable, but possible.
Intel are not forthcoming with documentation about NIC and crypto. Here is what OpenBSD has to say about this :
OpenBSD experience with Intel
Much like Intel does for all their networking division components, and completely unlike most other vendors, Intel steadfastly refuses to provide us with documentation. We have talked to about five technical people who are involved in the development of those products. They all want us to have documentation. They commend us on what we have done. But their hands are tied by management who does not perceive a benefit to themselves for providing documentation. Forget about Intel. (If you want to buy gigabit ethernet hardware, we recommend anything else... for the same reason: most drivers we have for Intel networking hardware were written without documentation).