Intel researchers put WiFi inside—the processor, that is

tldr: more efficient WIFI = longer battery life

I think maybe some of you missed the part where they say:

While the back-end elements of wireless have been digitized long ago, the front end—phase modulation, frequency synthesis, and RF power amplification, for example—have largely been dependent on analog components.

The problem posed by those analog components is that while digital components can be scaled down with improvements in silicon die manufacturing, the analog parts can't—as they get smaller, they get worse, Ratter said. Yorgos Palaskas, the research leader in Intel's radio integration lab, said that because analog components generally performed much better when manufactured on a larger scale, the analog components for WiFi transceivers and cell phones "are typically made on a separate fab."

...

Some of the components already existed in a digital form, but needed to be significantly improved. Intel had digital phase modulators already that were developed for satellite and mobile communications, but they only handled enough frequency channels for 3G communications. "We needed much wider channels for WiFi, up to 40 MHz of bandwidth," Palaskas said. "It required some very creative mathematical manipulation."

I think Wi-Fi will speed up faster than both SATA and disk drives, and SATA already is faster than portable hard disks.

For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ad aims at 7Gb/s. http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2012-mobile-hdd-charts/-0... gives max read speed for mobile disks at less than 1.5Gb/s.

Form that viewpoint, I can see a laptop disk drive that only needs a power connection. Battery-operated, you could even keep it in your bag while using it,

Big questions, however, are a) whether people will still want external drives for thei laptops. SSDs and the cloud may supplant them, b) whether the bandwidth is reliable enough (what if I sit next to someone who also has a Wi-Fi external drive?) and c) whether it is a wise idea to make it so easy to detach your disk. Software will have to be prepared to handle the case "user picks up laptop and walks out of range of external disk"

Especially for reasons a and b, I do not see this happen.

I think that other vendors are using two chips by putting them inside one package. I don't think anybody else made the cpu and rf sections on the chip yet. also nice is that the rf is made using digital technology which benefits from moore's law.

Does anyone else have security concerns about wifi "on the chip"

I mean at the moment I physically control access to my servers and know that the ethernet ports + usb access can be controlled by physical access.

Eg check out the banks / other financial institutions that superglue shut usb ports/physical Ethernet disconnection alarms etc

With wifi on the chip this all becomes moot.

I know the access vector is a little esoteric probably on the level of a bios attack but I still see this as being a big old security can of worms.

How many iterations have we had of various wifi security that have been upgraded over the past decade as fallible? With wifi on the chip unless the chip is replaced you're screwed and accessible by anyone "within range". Talk about Bluetooth war driving this is a way bigger problem.

Cheers, Dean

One reason why it's a clear cut no: latency. Maybe for file servers but not for operating system and application files. Expect always to have a few GBs accessible by wire (even if one day it is included in the SOC).