Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
On Wednesday, Intel announced its acquisition of Rivet Networks—makers of the Killer AC-brand line of gamer-oriented Wi-Fi gear—for an undisclosed price.
Intel Vice President Chris Walker describes the acquisition as "a terrific complement to our existing Wi-Fi products," going on to praise Rivet's products—the best known of which is the Killer Wireless-AC line of gaming-targeted Wi-Fi cards—and declare its intent to integrate the Killer line into Intel's broader PC Wi-Fi portfolio.
[...] Most gamers using Killer Wireless-AC products can get two potential benefits out of the stack—first, if their router and their gaming system both use Killer AC Wi-Fi interfaces, the router recognizes the Killer card in the gaming PC as a first priority and will ensure its traffic goes into the "lowest latency" bucket when shaping traffic.
Second, the Killer stack can recognize most AAA game traffic automatically and prioritize that traffic over the PC's own interface. This does nothing to alleviate congestion caused by a second device wanting to use the network—but it does, at least, allow the gamer's own PC to prioritize game traffic over Web browsing, email clients, and so forth running on the gamer's own PC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @06:10PM (3 children)
Did Intel get ripped off or are they planning to tweak WiFi so it spreads coronavirus just like 5G does? Any RF engineers care to speculate on how they can accomplish this upgrade and should we be worried about our home WiFi gear if Intel's modified virus starts spreading on the Internet?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @06:15PM (1 child)
Yes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @07:26PM
"42" is the answer. Glad to be of service - any other research you'd like me to do for you?
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by ilPapa on Monday May 25 2020, @02:09AM
I realize you are probably being sarcastic in this comment, but you should realize there may well be some Trump supporters reading this thread and they may well fall for this hoax the same way they fell for their bloated, degenerate leader.
Please be responsible and take into account that not everyone reading this has the ability to reason for themselves.
You are still welcome on my lawn.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @07:20PM (2 children)
The kernel driver, or possibly even on-card firmware, is giving a shit about an entirely different level.
It's like when video card companies got caught looking for a process named "DOOM".
This is gross. If this kind of priority is desirable, the non-driver part of the OS ought to let users mark processes to get special priority. We do it for CPU time, and on some systems for disk access. Doing it for network access is reasonable too. Putting that in the driver or on-card firmware is dirty, disgusting, and wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @08:55PM
>> Putting that in the driver or on-card firmware is dirty, disgusting, and wrong.
Remember, this is the same Intel that brought you IME... "dirty, disgusting and wrong" is one of their specialties.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Monday May 25 2020, @01:51AM
Don't worry about it.
"Gaming" wi-fi is just a way of selling crappy consumer grade gear to suckers* for slightly more money than they would otherwise be able to.
Anyway, Intel have bought the company, so it will be closed down in a year or so.
*Sucker's Mums actually.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @09:27PM (2 children)
Are you enjoying COVID-19, Boomers? I hope you are, because your political response to the pandemic has completely destroyed the economy. Did we really need a Great Recession in 2008 caused by you, and a Great Lockdown in 2020 caused by you? Are you proud of yourselves for creating an economic depression even worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s? Are you proud of yourselves, Boomers? Your legacy will be economic ruin for all. You don't care as long as you Boomers continue to receive your pensions. You Boomers don't have jobs. You Boomers don't create jobs. You Boomers don't do anything for anyone ever. You Boomers are utterly worthless parasites. You don't care about anybody except yourselves. Everybody except you is forced at gunpoint to wear a facemask while you Boomers sit in your giant mansions laughing and waiting to die when you will be buried with your fortunes so nobody will ever touch your precious money.
Boomers did COVID-19.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @09:41PM (1 child)
We gave you life. Isn't that enough for you ? Had we known then what we know now, we would have enjoyed life and kept all our money for that purpose instead of waisting it on worthless clueless millenials like you.
But we take comfort in the knowledge that in a decade or two, you'll be the ones having your hands full with your own bunch of entitled, ungrateful little shitfucks.
P.S. Yes, I know it was a troll. But some things have to be said, and the opportunity was too good to pass.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @10:16PM
Nobody remembers Generation X, apparently. Everybody is a Millennial to senile Boomer scum.
Where is your fucking face mask, old asshole?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @09:39PM (1 child)
My work laptop (Dell) has a "Killer wireless card" in it. It is just Atheros (from after Atheros was no longer good):
02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA6174 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev 32)
Doesn't seem like a company just making pcboards using other vendors' wireless chipsets would be worth very much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2020, @11:05PM
It's the marketing department they're after. Whoever can make people buy both a new nic and a router on the promise of some proprietary driver stack DWIMing a way out of all your latency problems, just might be able to keep people from buying AMD.
(Score: 4, Informative) by ledow on Monday May 25 2020, @12:10AM (2 children)
The whole "killer" thing is a load of junk.
If you cared, you'd have QoS enabled on all your network devices and tag the appropriate traffic.
And then watch as your QoS tags aren't respected upstream anyway, so it makes little difference.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2020, @12:49AM (1 child)
Everything I've heard about this "Killer" brand has been negative, so it will be a good fit in the Intel family of products.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2020, @04:21PM
The linux driver is pretty crap too. And Dell largely sells killer wifi with its linux xps13 line.