As far as I know, Quantenna is the only producer of 4x4:4 chipsets. Some other companies have "4x4" chipsets that are 4x4:3 and simply use the additional antenna for beamforming, diversity, etc.
Historically, Atheros has begun chest-beating about chipsets significantly in advance to their release. I think the AR9003 platform started being talked about it in general term around 18 months prior to general market availability of AR9003 products. I suspect you will have a very long wait if you are counting on Atheros (now Qualcomm) for 4x4 solutions. Interestingly, Qualcomm did announce 4x4:4 solutions a few years ago, but nothing came of them. They since acquired Atheros, so I suspect their internal 802.11 products were very unimpressive or even deeply flawed. The reality is that 4x4:4 solutions really provide diminishing improvements relative to cost. Every additional spatial stream causes a more than linear increase in DSP complexity, a linear increase in radio/amplifier cost, a slightly more than linear increase in power consumption (radio/amplifier+DSP), and an increase in PCB footprint. And for all this extra hassle and cost, you get a typically less-than-linear increase in throughput. The gains from jumping from 1x1:1 to 2x2:2 were huge, each increment above that is simply a lot less bang for your buck. I'm not saying it'll never happen, but the deck is somewhat stacked against 4x4:4 solutions. I think 802.11ac will very quickly emerge as the preferred means of adding bandwidth, with 4x4:4 being something that continues to slowly grow and only becomes seen much in the wild when 802.11ac hits. Note that Quantenna has already updated their 4x4:4 chipsets to support 802.11ac. -Galen On Jan 17, 2012, at 9:12 AM, Ben Greear wrote: > I've some customers asking for 4x4 MIMO support for our wifi testing > gear (which requires the ath9k virtualization features). > > Anyone know if Atheros is going to be offering a 4x4 MIMO solution > anytime soon? > > Thanks, > Ben > > -- > Ben Greear <[email protected]> > Candela Technologies Inc http://www.candelatech.com > _______________________________________________ > ath9k-devel mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.ath9k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath9k-devel _______________________________________________ ath9k-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ath9k.org/mailman/listinfo/ath9k-devel
