Intel Readies "Cyclone Peak" Wireless-AX 22260 WLAN Cards

[btarunr]

Intel is giving finishing touches to its new family of compact WLAN cards for portables and motherboards, under the "Cyclone Peak" family. These include the Wireless-AX 22260 sold under Intel's main brand, and two re-branded or differentiated products by RivetNetworks: Killer Wireless-AX 1650x (22260NGW), and Killer Wireless-AX 1650W (22260D2W). Device IDs for these cards were recently added to the IWLWIFI repository by Intel software teams. "Cyclone Peak" offers 802.11ax Wi-Fi connectivity, in addition to Bluetooth 5. 802.11ax provides about 37 percent higher data-rate than 802.11ac, but improved effective bandwidth due to better spectrum utilization.



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[TheLostSwede]

I would advice people to skip the first generation of 802.11ax hardware, since the standard hasn't been ratified yet and isn't likely to be ratified until Q3 this year at the earliest.
Obviously if this ends up in a new notebook, it's not going to be a bad thing, but don't waste money on the first generation routers, as there seems to be a lot of things that aren't finished yet and it's unclear if those features will be added via firmware/software updates or not.
Much as with 802.11ac, a lot of key features seems to be missing from the early routers and the same most likely applies to client devices too.
But someone has to be first I guess...
That said, 802.11ax does look like an actual improvement, even for 2.4GHz, but it will require all client devices to be 802.11ax to make a significant difference.

 

[TheGuruStud]

As quality as intel's 5G modems...oops!

 

[jeremyshaw]

As quality as intel's 5G modems...oops!

Eh? Intel's Wifi solutions have long been considered to be among the best money can buy. Realtek, Qualcomm, and Marvell just don't measure up (especially Marvell - it's stupidly popular for how bad it is).

Intel's LTE modems are to be avoided, but that doesn't have much bearing against their 5G modems, which have not even been released yet (like 5G itself, cellular 5G in particular).

 

[TheGuruStud]

Eh? Intel's Wifi solutions have long been considered to be among the best money can buy. Realtek, Qualcomm, and Marvell just don't measure up (especially Marvell - it's stupidly popular for how bad it is).

Intel's LTE modems are to be avoided, but that doesn't have much bearing against their 5G modems, which have not even been released yet (like 5G itself, cellular 5G in particular).

I remember not that long ago how garbage they were. They get no breaks from me. Going even further back you'd be lucky to get a signal through more than one wall lol. And we had the infamous centrino problem that couldn't be resolved, despite all the drivers claiming to.

Hell, I have an ivy bridge era laptop and wifi will drop and refuse to reconnect on enterprise APs until reboot.

 

[Tsukiyomi91]

I don't think 802ax will be mainstream enough once 802ac starts to saturate the market. It'll take a long time til end of 2019 to see some traction for 802ax to take place AND after the whole network naming convention confusion settles down for good.

 

[dorsetknob]

I can see this comming

Dear Guru's at TPU i bought one of these the "Cyclone Peak" wi fi card to upgrade my laptop but i cannot get it to work Any idea why

Answer
It will not work as your brand of laptop Does not whitelist its use

 

[TheLostSwede]

I can see this comming


Answer
It will not work as your brand of laptop Does not whitelist its use

Or someone shoved an M.2 card into a mini PCIe slot...

 

[Space Lynx]

Eh? Intel's Wifi solutions have long been considered to be among the best money can buy. Realtek, Qualcomm, and Marvell just don't measure up (especially Marvell - it's stupidly popular for how bad it is).

Intel's LTE modems are to be avoided, but that doesn't have much bearing against their 5G modems, which have not even been released yet (like 5G itself, cellular 5G in particular).

5g is already out in my home city of Indianapolis actually. you can buy a hotspot device for it

 

[Xpect]

So, and now when Do we See the 802.11ad Chipsets more in the wild? Much more useful than ax in my opinion.

 

[TheLostSwede]

So, and now when Do we See the 802.11ad Chipsets more in the wild? Much more useful than ax in my opinion.

It's being superseded by 802.11ay - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ay

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

I remember not that long ago how garbage they were. They get no breaks from me. Going even further back you'd be lucky to get a signal through more than one wall lol. And we had the infamous centrino problem that couldn't be resolved, despite all the drivers claiming to.

Hell, I have an ivy bridge era laptop and wifi will drop and refuse to reconnect on enterprise APs until reboot.

Ivy bridge is squarely in the era of good intel WiFi chips. The "bad era" was back during the XP days. If you are having problems, it is likely a hardware issue, driver problem, or an issue with your laptop OEM's motherboard or firmware design.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Ivy bridge is squarely in the era of good intel WiFi chips. The "bad era" was back during the XP days. If you are having problems, it is likely a hardware issue, driver problem, or an issue with your laptop OEM's motherboard or firmware design.

Not true, there are some still a lot of interoperability issues, although in all fairness, they're not all Intel's fault. But some Intel chipsets don't work well with QCA routers. It's a bit of a pot luck if you got one of those or not. I think it might be their first gen 802.11ac stuff that's quite dodgy if I remember right. Hence, don't get this...
Intel also doesn't allow you to use their chipsets as a Wi-Fi AP/bridge in notebooks (as a bridge, where the Ethernet port is connected to the internet), which is annoying and there's really no reason why they're doing this.

 

[yeeeeman]

Not true, there are some still a lot of interoperability issues, although in all fairness, they're not all Intel's fault. But some Intel chipsets don't work well with QCA routers. It's a bit of a pot luck if you got one of those or not. I think it might be their first gen 802.11ac stuff that's quite dodgy if I remember right. Hence, don't get this...
Intel also doesn't allow you to use their chipsets as a Wi-Fi AP/bridge in notebooks (as a bridge, where the Ethernet port is connected to the internet), which is annoying and there's really no reason why they're doing this.

I think the issue is more in the Qualcomm router, being shitty, than with the Intel card. Qualcomm is good at modems, but at WiFi it is not that great, hence all smartphones have broadcom wifi chips and many high-end routers have Broadcom chips. But yeah, in the PC side, Intel has some nice offerings.

 

[remixedcat]

I would advice people to skip the first generation of 802.11ax hardware, since the standard hasn't been ratified yet and isn't likely to be ratified until Q3 this year at the earliest.
Obviously if this ends up in a new notebook, it's not going to be a bad thing, but don't waste money on the first generation routers, as there seems to be a lot of things that aren't finished yet and it's unclear if those features will be added via firmware/software updates or not.
Much as with 802.11ac, a lot of key features seems to be missing from the early routers and the same most likely applies to client devices too.
But someone has to be first I guess...
That said, 802.11ax does look like an actual improvement, even for 2.4GHz, but it will require all client devices to be 802.11ax to make a significant difference.

If anything like draft .ac it's prolly gonna be worse, as companies are not having as much beta testing as they used to and just releasing half-baked products into the market instead of doing through betas like they did a few years ago. Companies would rather send samples to twitch thots instead of create a decent beta program and give samples to testers to make better.

 

[yeeeeman]

I agree. If it wasn't for Qualcomm rushing things like they always do, we would still have at least one year until final release spec hardware would reach market.