Intel’s been hammering away at the concept of sticking radio circuits on its CPUs for years now. A research project, codenamed Rosepoint by Intel, may just have cracked it.
A standard Wi-Fi chip is a relatively power-hungry analog beastie, and one that’s not easy to build on the kinds of nano scales that normal chips are built at. Intel’s Rosepoint eschews analog in favour of digital, where size scales can come down and power efficiency rockets up. It’s still a research project in development, but Wired reports that Intel’s managed to cram a digital Wi-Fi chip on an Atom processor. It’s not a project that’s quite ready for mass production just yet, but given the amount of noise that Intel’s made about this kind of design for many years, it’s clearly in Intel’s future — as well as an easy way into the radio chip market dominated by names such as Texas Instruments and Broadcom. [Wired]