Intel's Caswell Wi-Fi card. Please click to enlarge
by Anton Shilov
06/18/2004 | 09:46 AM
Intel Corporation will not enable the WLAN access point feature of its i915 “Grantsdale” and i925 “Alderwood” chipsets right after the launch, but will delay the capability till late fourth quarter this year.
<%BANNER[article]%>Intel’s i915-series as well as i925X chipsets that will be officially unveiled on Monday will not bring much-anticipated Wi-Fi capabilities straight away, but the company will enable the technology sometimes later this year. The reason for the delay is “just classic “ramp a new technology into volume”, Intel’s officials told eWeek.
Intel's Caswell Wi-Fi card. Please click to enlarge
Still, even without Wi-Fi, the new chipsets are expected to be revolutionary for Intel. The i915G, i915P, i925X and derivatives will bring dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM memory, PCI Express x16 and x1 lanes for add-in cards, Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 (i915G only), 4 Serial ATA-150, Azalia audio as well as some other important capabilities, such as promising RAID technologies.
Intel's Caswell Wi-Fi antennas. Please click to enlarge
The reason for postpones of Intel’s software WLAN access points are not clear, but one of the possible problems may be availability of special daughter cards with antennas required for wireless networks’ operation. Intel provides certain logic to control WLAN access points with its ICH6W – a component of Intel’s forthcoming chipsets.