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No WiFi In 'Grantsdale' Chipset
bizpile writes "A company spokesman confirmed Friday, Intel has decided not to enable the wireless access-point functionality in its 'Grantsdale" chipset. Intel decided not to include this feature because of the proliferation of cheap wireless access points. Spokesman Dan Snyder said, 'So many wireless APs are out there, and they're essentially free" when purchased in conjunction with DSL or cable service from an ISP. The company may still develop a custom chipset to re-enable the WiFi functionality if a large customer requests it. Also, their Centrino plans and production will be unchanged."
Actually it was chips where the FPU failed testing and was disabled.
Back in the DOS days, very few business apps needed a FPU, so it was a fair tradeoff for some customers.
I see, thanks for clarifying.
I'm not sure why a desktop needs wireless though, usually I figure if it is a desktop, it will stay where it is for a while and it is worth wiring it so I'd get good bandwidth.
Convenience. A lot of people don't want to deal with or are too stupid to deal with wires; using wireless for your desktop allows you to use the same network appliance for your desktop and laptop even if the appliance lacks ethernet out; and some people don't have all the desktop computers in their home in the same room.
Other than economics I wonder why Intel just doesn't produce a kick-ass mini-PCI card that supports the various wireless standards and then flog the Hell out of it to the PC makers. The mini-PCI approach, combined with well designed internal antennas works very well for the Macintosh.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Intel had Hyperthreading tech built into the Netburst-cored processors from day one, and merely disabled it in the earlier Pentium 4 processors. And unless you had access to a microprocessor engineering facility nearby, it stayed off. I would assume they'll handle it the same way with their core logic chipsets from now, especially after mainboard manufacturers managed to enable the "soft-off" memory enhancement feature in the i865 chipset, effectively turning it into the more expensive i875 chipset (sans the integrated gigabit ethernet, of course, but that wasn't a huge selling point to home users for the most part anyway).
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
haven't look into Grantsdale processor yet, assuming it will be used in a laptop
Grantsdale is a derivitave of the Northwood process used to make the majority of P4's (I work at Intel, trust me on the product evolution here...). Grantsdale was certainly not intended to be soley laptop-grade chipsets, in fact, it is intended to be in high-end desktops, boasting the 7.1 Dolby sound, GigE network, and Serial ATA, to name a few features. In the marketplace, it's known as i915 and i925 (as far as I'm aware right now of what we're actually marketing). I hope this helps distinguish what's out there and what the intentions of it are.
Who would ask for WIFI to be put into the chipset of a computer?
Look back five or eight years. Who would have asked for any network card to be built into the chipset of a computer? (I remember listening to people whine that the IDE controllers were being integrated into the chipsets.) And yet NVidia's integrated NIC is a top-notch performer, and it's tough to find a motherboard without integrated network these days. And as more people move from ethernet to wireless networking, moving from embedded ethernet to embedded wireless is a natural shift - and I believe that we will, in the future, see more motherboards with integrated wireless networking.
Who would like an Access Point feature placed into the chipset?
Anyone who wants to use the computer as a router. You know, like all of those people who use PCs with that one OS as routers. What was it called? Oh yeah, "Linux"....
There is, of course, no denying that Microsoft does some pretty underhanded and monopolistic things. But, there's also no denying that these things (done correctly) can be a great convenience to a lot of people.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Compared especially to the very early 486SX chips, You are absolutely right, in many instances the AMD 386DX-40 would either be faster or be a much better value.
However, the later AMD-based 386DX boards that were cheap used surface-mounted CPU's and from an upgrade-sense were foobar. The ones that were socketed could be upgraded to a Cyrix chip that was often a nightmare, between having to use utilities in the autoexec to enable the L1 cache, and having previously stable systems decide they would start locking up at random.
A 486SX-33 on a board with 256KB cache and VL-Bus slots would cream it, though, and had a very sweet upgrade path.
Once AMD had their 486's on the market, a lot of those boxen that didn't get hand-me-down intel DX2's got the (very affordable) AMD DX2-66.
Going that route and buying high-quality motherboards was a major win. They could have had a third round of CPU upgrades, but the price/performance ratio on the Intel 'overdrive' CPU's was just too pathetic.
QUake required one, but quake was WAY after the days of 486s, let alone 486sx. When quake was release i had a P133...
NO game of the 486sx are needed FPU. Not doom, not Duke nukem 3d, not Rise of the Triad,... They all didnt even SUPPORT fpu ops, because at that time even the 487 was much slower than integer math and look up tables (4cyle add and 15 or so cycle mul if i remember correctly)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?