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Intel Working on Agile Wireless Chip
Rob writes "Computer Business Review is reporting that Intel has announced that its scientists had
invented a new type of chip that can process signals from different types of wireless
networks. The chip also could handle upcoming WiMax technology, that promises
wireless internet connectivity for up to 30 miles, and future flavors of WiFi."
"It is more of a proof of concept rather than a device that will see the light of day," he said. That's because the chip integrates only analogue and not digital circuitry and WiFi chip would require both types to make it usable by a digital device.
This type of agile chip is the "holy grail for Intel," said Sam Lucero, an analyst at research shop IDC.
:P
Let's see if they manages to find it then
Scully: Should we arrest David Copperfield?
Mulder: Yes we should, but not for this.
The next Apple portable chip?
Now I can see every wireless network for 10 miles, I'll have all sorts of crazy names to sift through!
...
:) ]
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I'm on a college campus, so if I walk down the street, I can see almost dozens of seperate wireless networks (from apartments to different college wireless zones)
If they expanded wireless to 10 miles... oh my!
[not that I'd torment anybody, but it's always fun to look around
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
Oh, no. This is an *Intel* chip. It will be best used with Mac OS X, of course.
Hot on the heels of its stunning disclosure of the "heat sink", which someday may allow computers to have processors that never overheat no matter how far they're overclocked, Intel has invented "firmware".
Firmware will allow the electronics giant to reprogram its chips when new standards are developed. That should help Intel avoid a replay of the wireless Centrino debacle, in which they were shipping 10Mhz mobile chips into a market driven by 54Mhz base stations.
sigs, as if you care.
Any possibility that this new wireless chip will replace Blue Tooth and/or Airport in a Mactel machine?
That 30 mile (48 km?) range sounds awfully nice, but I would guess it's not a figure to be relied on for regular use. The WiMAX forum's home page provides some more realistic range figures:
In a typical cell radius deployment of three to ten kilometers, WiMAX Forum Certified(TM) systems can be expected to deliver capacity of up to 40 Mbps per channel, for fixed and portable access applications. This is enough bandwidth to simultaneously support hundreds of businesses with T-1 speed connectivity and thousands of residences with DSL speed connectivity. Mobile network deployments are expected to provide up to 15 Mbps of capacity within a typical cell radius deployment of up to three kilometers.
It sounds like 3 km (under 2 miles) from a tower is best, with up to 10 km (just over 6 miles) plausible.
Jamie
Intel announced a year ago that they wanted all their chips to have wireless network connectivity. All their CHIPS. That's the point of this work.
'
As excited as I am about WiMax, I'm just as interested in whether or not this chip will be compatible with HSDPA, which is looking to be the competing standard in the coming years.
Cingular, the nation's largest cellular carrier, is making a big push for HSDPA, hoping to have it rolled out in 15-20 markets by the end of the year. 3 Mbps wireless internet with a coverage area as large as Cingulars' is a pretty tempting prospect to me, and having compatibility built in to my devices with this Intel chip might just seal the deal.
Will this bring back the good old days of the BBS? I remember way back when, in the late 80's and early 90's, calling up different boards with my Commodore 64, which I still have in it's original box...
Synchronize your calendar and mobile phone via text messaging.
Admittedly it'd be cool to cover a huge area with one base station, but I'd really like to see some improvements to the transfer rates. Whoever came up with the 11 and 54 Mpbs numbers must have been smoking something - I don't think I've ever seen either go above 8 Mbps. OK, so high speeds are good marketing, but getting 1/10th of the promised performance is pretty lame.
READY.
#
I, for one, would welcome a fresh new comedic voice to the Slashdot community!
"Won't we have to beef up network security?"
I'm not claiming to be an expert here, but if they could deliver this gargantuan wireless range, won't that provoke more crackers to break through the security so they can leech net access off of the Starbucks HotSpot a few miles away?
It just seems logical to me that with such an impressive possible range of operation, there would be a greater tempation to pickpocket with telekinesis, so to speak.
That's just my thought on it.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
Will users be able to upgrade it via Flash to the latest wireless technologies?
Remember Back In The Day when some 33.6 modems could be flashed up to the latest 56k standards?
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Mayby one from a company so rich that it can afford shills?
They have scientists?!
We should publish a list of the wackiest names. GO and check out your area from a wardriver's point of view at this public repository.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I like the use of this word - it conjures up in my imagination a group of scientists sitting at laboratory workbenches, silently and meticulously mixing together different substances using glass bottles, piping, Bunsen burners and crucibles, when one of them suddenly jumps up and shouts "Eureka! It lives! It lives".
Will the Intel proof of concept chip design be available so that someone outside of Intel could design a digital chip based on the proof of concept design?
If the bands for WiMax are the same three ring circus we've seen in the 802.11b range for metro areas there is just no point to even trying - the noise floor for 2402-2483MHz in metro Omaha is so thick you can walk on it, and the 5.2 - 5.8GHz stuff is headed that way.
I don't pay much attention to this stuff any more, since its a miserable waste of time and money here, but I hear tell of some sort of frequency allocation scheme for some of the new spectrum that has been opened
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
American Engineering's hallmark is world renown for its design of *independent* systems. American's redundancy in independent systems provides a level of robustness superior to an integrated design.
/. will bite at any new angle to auger your grip on the clicker.
Intel multiplexing a blackbox all-in-one chip flys in the face of historical precedent. You young whippersnapper's at
Go back to bed...
-r
I hope the Intel chip is capable of snagging all the different flavors of wireless. We already have a bunch in the 802.11 area. Now with WiMax...especially in the US...we have a bunch more. Scary thing is, the "The Federal Communications Commission has chosen to allocate radio spectrum in the 3.5- and 10-gigahertz bands to private WiMax providers. The rest of the developed world has WiMax allocation in different spectrum locations." Business Week Thus, we have a myriad of flavors here in the US, then the US standards of course don't conform to international standards. We may be needing laptops with a whole slew of different chips or for Intel to kick some major arse in their chip R&D.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
With this new chip, I can see the Verizon guy going, "Can you hack me now? Good!"
Nice...
Your precious AMD doesn't have a similar proof of concept, and immediately there is "nothing to see here". Talk about sour grapes.
These huge "WiFi" footprints are really not that useful. Because each giant hotspot has to share the limited bandwidth. Rural areas will benefit from 2 million acres (30mi radius) served by only 155-500Mbps, because they've only got a few hundred people (and a lot of cows) willing to share 0.5-1.5Mbps. But cities must share that bandwidth in a vastly higher density. Manhattan, for example, would need a couple WiMax APs for every block, which typically have hundreds of pedestrians - never mind the stationary people in buildings, near a wire, or the hundreds more in cars/buses. Suburbs and most towns also exceed the density threshold. Until more bandwidth per square meter is available, 30mi radius footprints will be suitable mostly for one-way broadcast, or short messaging. Sometimes known as "radio".
--
make install -not war
Sorry, no fun here, because I don't believe that Intel will deliver
I'm still waiting on 350MHz 64-bit and RISC based Merced that Intel promised long ago. (ok Merced was put on the market, except specs were completely different)
Intel very often promises and very rarely delivers.
From here on* my own biased opinion
All that Intel has done good (or bad, I still blame them for 386 fiasco, when they based chip on what software uses and not original IBM specs [IBM 286 already had multithreading and other specs in fact it was more of technical wonder than Intels 486. Only reason for Intel to bypass on specs was just that no software used it in that time, so no one noticed it]. Intel is in my opinion the first reason that computing evolution has gone backwards) was in the past.
Look at the Intel now.
1. Their Mobile is based on P3 (just a lot of cache added). I won't say that my Centrino 1.7 is bad, but I will get rid of him as soon as HP puts out Turion models. All I say is that why P4 when it seems that P3 is better?
2. While in the good old days AMD was creating chips that were overheating and Intels runed cool, nowadays situation is completely different. AMD cca.30-35 degees (while compiling kernel) and Intel 70 degrees in standby??
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Why does everything have to be "agile?"
1. Their Mobile is based on P3 (just a lot of cache added). I won't say that my Centrino 1.7 is bad, but I will get rid of him as soon as HP puts out Turion models. All I say is that why P4 when it seems that P3 is better?
The Pentium M (no, the M does not stand for "mobile") is indeed based off the Pentium 3 heritage (but it's not a Pentium 3), while the Pentium 4 is a different beast. Someone with more detailed knowledge of Intel's processor lines can explain it better than I can, but the Pentium M takes a different approach to getting better performance than the Pentium 4 (whose approach basically amounts to HyperThreading, deeper pipelines, and insance clock speeds to counteract lackluster per-cycle performance).
Intel went with the P4, then created the Pentium M, found they had something worked much better than the P4, and appears to be focusing their development efforts on adding dual cores and x86-64 extensions to the Pentium M. All the better, I guess. My P4 3 Ghz puts off a huge amount of heat, and it's annoying now that the temperature around here is approaching 90 F and I don't have A/C.
from the article:
""It is more of a proof of concept rather than a device that will see the light of day," he said. That's because the chip integrates only analogue and not digital circuitry and WiFi chip would require both types to make it usable by a digital device."
All they've done is build a radio that probably runs at 2.5GHz and is probably direct conversion down to baseband. If it has enough bandwidth, linearity, and low enough phase noise in the LO, it can be used with a variety of MAC chips to implement various protocols. They may have even made the filters switchable to allow it to operate at 5G and other bands as well. Nothing revolutionary here.
Vote for Pedro
The important part is that it's CMOS. Now, they can make one cheaper chip that does the RF and the digital baseband processing.
Wonder how close they are to a software radio on a chip? Imagine one chip that does all the RF and digital processing for everything from GSM/EDGE to UMTS to CDMA2000 to 802.11x to future UWB.