Intel’s Grantsdale/Alderwood future may be restricted by the Chinese encryption standard. End users won’t be able to take advantage of a feature in Intel’s upcoming Grantsdale (i875P) and Alderwood chipsets that allows PCs to function as access points for a wireless network.
Both Grantsdale and Alderwood chips share support for 800-MHz and 533-MHz front-side buses; dual channel memory; four Serial ATA ports, 8 USB 2.0 ports; RAID 0 and RAID 1; four PCI Express x1 lanes for use with ExpressCards; and Intel’s High-Definition Audio, formerly code-named Azalia. The chipset also includes a soft access point for wireless communication.
Intel plans to start shipping its Grantsdale and Alderwood chipsets for the Pentium 4 during the second quarter of this year. The first CPUs to be used with Grantsdale chipset will use 3.6GHz Pentium 4 processors.“This will become our computing platform for the next 10 years,” said Bill Leszinske, director of chipset and software marketing at Intel’s Desktop Products Group, speaking on the sidelines of the Cebit exhibition in Hanover, Germany.
In addition to support for PCI Express and DDR2, some versions of the chipsets have the ability to turn a PC equipped with a WLAN card into an access point (AP) for 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g wireless networks. This feature, called soft access point, will make it easier for home users to set up a wireless network, Leszinske said.
“Forty percent of home WLAN equipment gets returned because users are having a hard time setting them up,” he said, referring to the U.S. market.
Grantsdale and Alderwood may make setting up a wireless home network easier for users but the AP feature falls afoul of China’s national WLAN standard. The Chinese WLAN standard is very close to the 802.11 wireless networking standard but it employs a different security protocol, WAPI (WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure).
“Implementing the soft access point will be a challenge until we resolve the issue for the security standards,” Leszinske said.
The Chinese standard requires that all Wi-Fi gear sold in China use WAPI as the security protocol.
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