Qualcomm Buys Atheros For $3.1 Billion | Hacker News Reader

Qualcomm Buys Atheros For $3.1 Billion

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23 pointssandipc12 comments

The real question is, what is this going to do for future Atheros chipsets and open source drivers? Atheros has always been the chipset to use for Wifi on open source operating systems because it was generally well supported, and provided features the competition couldn't.

I really hope that Qualcomm doesn't change anything in that regard.

Atheros never supported the development of the open source drivers until ath9k/802.11n. The reason they are so robust is because Atheros chipsets are one of, if not the, most common WiFi chipset in use. Atheros was also one of the first to market with 802.11G chips and madwifi was one of the first to support 802.11G on Linux.

But they could also make it immensely harder to do so, look at prism 54, which require binary blobs to work right, and even then have random failures, or the ralink stuff. It is nowhere near as good as the Atheros stuff.

I thought Wifi was a commodity market now. So I'm a little surprised to see Qualcomm buying into a commodity market. What does Atheros have that Qualcomm can't license cheaply from elsewhere and use it's own relationships to sell? This seems like Atheros quitting when they're at the top (smart move by them).

Is Qualcomm really interested in supplying to the smallish market for $30 wifi routers and network cards? I haven't ever seen an Atheros-powered laptop, which is a much larger market.

I used always looked for Atheros-powered wifi desktop cards because of their Linux support, but nowadays it seems like several chipsets are well-supported.

Wouldn't it be better for Qualcomm to supply its own WiFi/Bluetooh integrated SoC like say TI? With Atheros they can do that, no?

But if that is the main (or only) goal, why spend $3 billion to buy the company when you could license or buy IP for much less?

I am not certain it is more beneficial to buy/license IP in all cases. Plus they are getting IP/Human Resources/Revenues from Atheros perpetually - they do sell fair amount.

I haven't ever seen an Atheros-powered laptop

My Thinkpad has an Atheros card in it.

Your Thinkpad has an internal Wifi chip powered by Atheros? Is this an Intel-powered laptop? Or did you buy a 3rd party card and plug it in? Do you remember if you chose this as an extra-cost option when you bought the laptop? I vaguely remember that in the past one of the flavors of wifi used to available in built-in wifi only with Atheros (for extra cost).

I know Atheros own the (smallish) 3rd party card market. I thought Intel owned the (huge) built-in Wifi market for Intel-powered PCs.

[*] Sorry about barrage of questions. I'd just like to know understand what Atheros does better. Thanks.

Well, strictly speaking, my Thinkpad (a T30, got it used a year ago from a friend-of-a-friend) came with an Intel card. I changed it out for an Atheros card I pulled from a dead Thinkpad on a pallet a few years before. I have no idea if that was stock or not.

Thanks for the clarification. Your Thinkpad seems to be from the era before built-in Wifi, then. i.e., before Wifi was commonplace.

> I haven't ever seen an Atheros-powered laptop, which is a much larger market.

My Asus Eee 1005P has an ath9k chip in it, and my 701 before that had an ath5k. If it's the netbook market they're going for, that would seem smart.

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