[jhaglund]

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."