Old friends who often pay attention to our three easy lives may remember that we have had quite a lot of content to popularize or spit on WiFi routers before.
Why do we pay special attention to routers? This is because on the one hand, with the rise of high-quality online videos, large-scale games, and online education today, more and more consumers have begun to have higher requirements for the network experience of families and enterprises. On the other hand, when the network experience encounters stuttering and delay, many friends do not realize that the real problem may not be in the operator, or on the mobile phone and computer, but because the WiFi router equipment used is too old, and the computing power and technical standards are seriously insufficient.
Routers also want to talk about computing power? This is something you need to know
I have to say that the severity of this problem is actually far beyond the imagination of the family. Because many consumers still do not know that the "route" in the name of the WiFi router is essentially a calculation process for scheduling network packets. To put it more bluntly, when the bandwidth of the home is getting larger and larger, and the download speed of the game or video is getting faster and faster, the "routing" computing load on the router actually increases synchronously. This means that faster internet speeds inherently put more pressure on the router's CPU, memory, and even system stability.
The main control chip and memory chip of the router, few manufacturers will publicly inform the consumer model before
However, unlike the PC and smartphone industries, for a long time in the past, the WiFi router industry has been secretive about "technical standards" and "hardware configuration". Many router manufacturers not only never announce what kind of hardware platform their router products use, how many CPU cores, how high the main frequency is, how large the memory is, and even do not want consumers to know that "the router also has a CPU, but also depends on the hardware computing power".
Why are these vendors doing this? Obviously, they just want to maintain information asymmetry with consumers, thereby reducing the cost of their own products and playing the trick of "technology is based on shell change".
To end the asymmetry of WiFi hardware information, Qualcomm is indispensable
Of course, the "information asymmetry" trick of some terminal manufacturers is of course harmful to the entire industry. Therefore, since a few years ago, some upstream chip suppliers and a small number of head router equipment brands have begun to work hard to "clean up the source".
It is also in this process that Qualcomm, the smartphone head chip manufacturer we are familiar with, has gradually stood out and become the main driving force for the WiFi router industry to really start fierce hardware competition.
In 2013, Qualcomm launched the IPQ (Internet Processor Qualcomm) series of "Internet Processor" product lines. Compared with other router master control chips in the past, the IPQ series not only introduces the self-developed architecture of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 series, but more importantly, it may be the industry's first high-profile router chip solution that exposes processor frequency, architecture and other information to consumers (not just manufacturers) and emphasizes the CPU and NPU computing power levels.
It has to be said that the birth of the Qualcomm IPQ series has ignited the flame of "performance competition" in the field of high-end routers. It doesn't just offer a new choice of flagship router chips for device makers who aspire to it. More importantly, relying on qualcomm's active publicity, more and more consumers are beginning to realize that "the original router chip is so important".
After the victory of the first battle, Qualcomm soon began to take advantage of the chase. The first is the upgraded dual-core CPU flagship IPQ8065, and with a high frequency of 1.7GHz, it has become the absolute performance king in the era of WiFi5 routers. Then there is the popular IPQ4000 series, which has allowed many entry-level routers of hundreds of yuan to bid farewell to the single-core era and upgrade to a quad-core CPU in one go.
In the era of WiFi6, the WiFi router market ushered in a major change in hardware
On October 4, 2018, the WiFi Alliance officially announced that it would rename the 802.11ax technical specification as "WiFi 6", and at the same time name the previous two generations of technology 802.11n and 802.11ac as WiFi4 and WiFi5 respectively.
For the entire industry, this is undoubtedly a very critical node. Because of this official "renaming", it actually means that the entire industry has finally begun to pay attention to technical transparency and has begun to really promote updated standards and products to consumers.
Almost at this point in time, Qualcomm also changed their Internet processor publicity strategy, began to dilute the complex models that started with IPQ and were difficult to remember, and named The Interactive Home (entry-level to mid-range) and Networking Pro (mid-to-high-end to flagship) as the new WiFi router chip platform naming method at a glance.
So in just over three years, we have not only seen WiFi6 completely eliminate the WiFi5 standard from top to bottom, but also become the absolute mainstream WiFi technology on the market. More importantly, the WiFi6 router products currently on sale will find that even the most entry-level models are mostly equipped with multi-core Internet processor chips produced by Qualcomm, which are several times stronger in performance than the MIPS architecture single-core solutions of previous years.
Not to mention that in the top flagship market, Qualcomm's Networking Pro 1210 (12-channel concurrent, tri-band 11000Mbps) and Networking Pro 1610 (16-channel concurrency, tri-band 11000Mbps) solutions have achieved a variety of ultra-high-end WiFi6E router products with different forms, and even 10 Gigabit, tens of gigabit-level MESH router sets.
Taking the lead in releasing the WiFi7 networking platform, Qualcomm once again led the change
However, the success achieved in the WiFi6 and WiFi6E stages obviously did not satisfy Qualcomm. So during the MWC (Mobile World Congress) in early March this year, Qualcomm also launched the industry's first commercial solution based on the WiFi7 standard, FastConnect 7800, bringing up to 5.8Gbps wiFi networking performance to the next generation of smartphones, laptops and other devices.
When the time came to May this year, the new generation of WiFi7 version of Qualcomm Networking Pro networking platform was finally officially unveiled.
How strong is the Sub-Era Networking Pro? Taking the strongest model that has been announced so far, networking Pro 1620, for example, it can support up to 16 concurrent channels, use four frequency bands at the same time, have up to 30,000Mbps of internal data processing throughput, and also support multiple 2.5Gbp and/or 10Gbps wired network ports forwarding.
What is this concept? First of all, from the perspective of internal processing performance, Qualcomm's next-generation flagship Networking Pro platform has at least more than 300% of the top platform of this generation. This means that its CPU and NPU (network processing unit) specifications must have undergone great changes, and it is likely that it will span several generations of architectural updates, and the number of cores is also expected to increase significantly.
Secondly, from the perspective of wireless specifications, the next generation of Networking Pro platform is designed for the WiFi7 standard. This doesn't just mean it will have tens of thousands of gigabits of total transmission bandwidth. More importantly, thanks to WiFi7's enhanced multi-band connectivity, it will be able to truly enable simultaneous connectivity and transmission of multiple bands for a single device. For example, your phone will be able to connect to both the 5GHz and 6GHz bands, no longer divided into "main and secondary WiFi", so as to get the superimposed transmission speed effect.
Finally, according to the information released by Qualcomm, the next-generation Networking Pro platform will support multiple 2.5Gbps and/or 10Gbps wired network ports. It should be known that at present, some areas of the mainland have opened 2000Mbps home optical broadband services, but many old high-end router products can only provide gigabit network ports, and have to connect two network cables at the same time to run full of household bandwidth. Even the current few new high-end WiFi6 routers, most of them only have a 2.5Gbps wired network port, which cannot achieve real gigabit-level wired network forwarding.
With the release of Qualcomm's next-generation Networking Pro platform, we will really expect to usher in flagship WiFi router products equipped with four or even eight ports with 2.5Gbps connectivity capabilities, and truly play the potential of intranet bandwidth above gigabit level.
It's worth noting that while we've talked about the next-generation Networking Pro platform's huge improvements in performance, speed, and home network experience. But in fact, its role is now not limited to the home WiFi router scenario. This is because WiFi7 technology has made great improvements in low latency, so the next-generation Qualcomm Networking Pro platform that supports the WiFi7 standard actually has the potential for use in industrial automation and even intelligent transportation.
Of course, then again, for the home WIFi device market, the release of a new generation of Qualcomm Networking Pro platform will naturally trigger a new round of router performance "arms race", thereby eliminating those old devices and antique chips that have not been updated for many years. And this, for all consumers, will actually be a good thing.
【Some of the pictures in this article are from the network】