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Alienware Chooses Airgo chipsets for new laptops

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the battle-of-the-machines dept.

Julios Lanza writes "Alienware has chosen chipsets made by Airgo Networks to power two game-focused laptops. Alienware's 17-inch Aurora m9700 and 19-inch Aurora mALX notebooks are equipped with the Airgo's Gen3 True MIMO (multiple input, multiple output). Airgo's chips are designed to connect a computer with Wi-Fi systems at speeds fast enough to make high-performance gaming possible, Airgo executives said."

3 of 33 comments (clear)

  1. That's amazing! ... ? by tomstdenis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    And we care because?

    If I want a serious gaming rig it'll be a desktop where I can upgrade parts without paying a serious fortune or having to mail my rig back to Dell for upgrades.

    Laptops are for work. Work involves travel. Lighter is better. Screw having a 250W laptop capable of playing Oblivion at 2560x1280 at 60fps if I can't lug it around to some random meeting half way around the world.

    Oh, this is written on a Fujitsu Lifebook. A laptop that gets 7 hours of battery life, runs both linux and windows, weighs about 4 lbs and fits easily in my knapsack. I like my Insprion Dell laptop [630m] but compared to the lifebook it's a monster. Weighs nearly 8lbs and while it fits in my bag as well it's a bit more cumbersome to lug around.

    Tom

    --
    Someday, I'll have a real sig.
  2. High performance gaming? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    What high performance? I play day of defeat and at the highest load of players on the server I only need about 5-7 k/sec throughput to not lag. You can do that pretty much with one of those old fashioned "modems". It's not like the original multicast multiplayer network-destroying version of DOOM for pete's sake.

  3. Um, WRONG. by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 2, Insightful

    NOT rebranded Linksys.

    Linksys does not make their own silicon. Neither, I believe, does Cisco. (As evidenced by one of the major reasons for Lucent spinning off their microelectronics business as Agere - Despite being a Cisco competitor, Lucent was selling a lot of silicon to Cisco and Agere stood to sell even more as a non-competitor of Cisco.)

    Airgo (along with Broadcom and many other companies) are SUPPLIERS of Linksys. Note that this does not make Linksys "rebranded Airgo", as Linksys just buys the ICs and builds a box around them.

    By your definition, Intel is "rebranded Dell".

    Commenting on the announcement itself - Stock 802.11g is more than sufficient for online gaming. The bottleneck will be one's connection to the outside world for a LONG time. To the geeks of Slashdot, this means that if you want to run Linux on your laptop and have everything work, stay far away from this laptop. Now that reverse engineered Broadcom WLAN drivers exist for Linux, Airgo is basically the only chipset vendor without any Linux support. (At least that was the case as of December when I was shopping for new WLAN hardware.)

    I find it interesting that Linksys was perfectly happy to profit from Linux by using it in the WRT54G, but probably sells the highest percentage of non-Linux-compatible WLAN hardware. (Almost all recent Linksys products, especially any that contain extensions beyond vanilla 802.11g such as the SRX and SpeedBooster lines, use Broadcom or Airgo silicon.)

    --
    retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?