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Alienware Chooses Airgo chipsets for new laptops
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."
So the "Alienware" line of Dell laptops gets the same chipset as other Dell laptops.
Or, in other words, "alienware" have already become normal Dell machines, only with garish colors and a higher price tag.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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.
"Poserdot" - News For People Stupid Enough To Pay Three Times The Price For A PC In A Colourful Case.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I did check up on the specs of these two machines, 8.5lbs and 15lbs with batteries for the 17" and 19" machines. Fact is, its obvious that these are not aimed at business users and as such should not be judged by those standards. They make no claim to "laptop style portability", they are desktop replacements. The have "portability" that a lot of gamers, who again are the market, want.
LAN parties are fun, whats not fun is lugging the stuff you need. Getting "portables" to that same level of performance is something many people want.
What would be wrong with someone owning one of these as well as a real notebook? Nothing. There are many of us who would love to have all the power of a real desktop without having to have permanent space set aside for it.
Ideally I would have a small, very small at that, base system connected to my internet provider and then wireless for the systems I actually use. Having a laptop like this means I can game anywhere I want and then put the thing away easily. Just as I don't have my audio equipment on some pedestal to show it off neither do I have PCs around to gloat. (all these windowed monsters make me laugh)
don't need it or don't want it, fine, but that really isn't grounds to call into question as to why it exists. Saying Laptops are for work is as ignorant as claiming thats all computers are good for.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Airgo's "True MIMO" is a pre-standard interpretation of the future 802.11blah (TGnSync vs. WWiSE) and will most likely not be compatible with the final 802.11n.
The MIMO concept itself offers to double the throughput at the expense of increasing bandwidth from 20 to 40MHz as well as spreading multipath garbage on the spectrum. If you've had fun with congestion on 802.11b/g channels, this 802.11n will really make your day.
Ok, so it might have marginally better spectral efficiency per Mbps but really, what we want to see is true beamforming dynamic-arrays that will properly 'point' the RF where it's supposed to go in real-time.
Meanwhile one of these 'gaming' laptops will just screwup the spectrum and slowdown existing b/g channels.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
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?
Alienware is not choosing chipsets for their laptops, because it's not in the buisness of designing laptops. Alienware laptops are rebranded laptops of OEM Clevo. The same laptops are also rebranded as Sager, Eurocom, Falcon NW, Voodo PC, and some others.