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."

Comments

Re:Never mind nonessential

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Have they fixed Centrino yet?

[multiplexo]

My experience with Centrino was that it didn't work. I ended up installing PCMCIA cards to get wireless support. Maybe I didn't have the right drivers, in the commercials I saw people surfing the net in the Acropolis (perhaps it's now an 802.11x hotspot), I couldn't get consistent performance 15 feet from the access point with a clear line of sight.

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.

Re:Dumb question

[EndlessNameless]

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).

Re:It's the 486 all over again

[spacefrog]

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.