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from the like-a-laser-with-a-very-wide-beam dept.
Qualcomm's new Wi-Fi chips are meant to rival 5G speeds
Qualcomm is launching a family of chips that can add incredibly high-speed Wi-Fi — at speeds up to 10 gigabits per second — to phones, laptops, routers, and so on. It's the start of a new generation of this super-fast Wi-Fi standard, but it isn't going to be used to speed up your typical web browsing. And whether it catches on at all remains an open question.
[...] WiGig relies on a connection standard known as 802.11ad, which can hit speeds up to 5 gigabits per second over close to 10 meters, according to Dino Bekis, the head of Qualcomm's mobile and compute connectivity group. Qualcomm's latest chips move WiGig up to a new generation of that wireless standard, called 802.11ay, which Bekis says can reach speeds twice as fast, and can do so up to 100 meter away. The Wi-Fi Alliance says the new standard "increases the peak data rates of WiGig and improves spectrum efficiency and reduces latency."
So why not just use this as normal Wi-Fi, given how fast it gets? Because that range is only line-of-sight — when there's literally nothing in the way between the transmitter and the receiver. This high-speed Wi-Fi is based on millimeter wave radio waves in the 60GHz range. That means it's really fast, but also that it has a very difficult time penetrating obstacles, like a wall. That's a problem if you want a general purpose wireless technology.
[...] It's not clear if this will really catch on, though. While there's definitely room for adoption from VR gamers, the earlier version of this tech has found minimal pickup in its couple years on the market. Asus recently made interesting use of it with the ROG Phone, which is designed for gamers. And Qualcomm says it's working with Facebook to use this tech for its Terragraph project, which wirelessly delivers home internet connections.
With 5:1 "visually lossless" compression, 10 Gbps could be enough for 5K @ 120 Hz.
Also at Engadget.
Related: AMD Acquires Nitero, a Maker of Wireless Chips for VR Headsets
Intel to Cease Shipments of Current WiGig Products, Focus on WiGig for VR
VirtualLink Consortium Announces USB Type-C Specification for VR Headsets
Wi-Fi Alliance Rebrands Wi-Fi Standards
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday October 18 2018, @10:11PM
It's what's needed for good untethered VR, i.e. a desktop PC communicating to a VR headset within a room. Otherwise, we have to ride the heck out of Moore's law in order to cram the best CPU, GPU, and perhaps more (neuromorphic component?) into a smartphone SoC. With tricks like foveated rendering [theverge.com], Seurat [google.com], etc. it may be possible to achieve great standalone VR. And maybe we will bust out of the death of Moore's law by making vertically stacked transistors. But WiGig is a good option that can allow you to put a multi-kilowatt monster to work in the corner instead of on your head.
While there will be line of sight issues, there is a possiblity that beamforming can be used by 60 GHz devices to bounce off walls:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/07/beamforming-your-data-how-wigig-will-offer-7gbps-speeds/ [arstechnica.com]
Also, it or another wireless standard would need to get above 10 Gbps at some point in order to target very high resolutions and framerates. 32K at 240 Hz, anyone? [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]