WeakLanguage

I dont have any, and I'm not going to dig up some to pretend I do.

I am speaking off the cuff as someone heavily involved and interested in RF in general and WiFi/LTE in particular.

From my anecdota(shame this isnt a word), Atheros chips have better SNR and higher symbol discrimination thanks to cleaner amps, better signal discrimination logic, and tend to be on the forefront of newer RF techniques in the WiFi space. All this culminates in better throughput, latency, and spectrum utilization than anyone else.

It also helps that their support under Linux is far superior to most everything else, which helps in Router/AP/Client integration and testing.

I don't even like Qualcomm, but from my experience, you will almost always regret choosing someone else for anything but the most basic requirements.

WiFi: Tier 1 is unquestionably Qualcomm Atheros (surprise!).

Ethernet NIC/CNA rankings(IMHO):

1. Mellanox is the pack leader right now.

2. Chelsio is right up there with them, but not leading.

3. SolarFlare and Intel bring up the middle ground.

4. Everyone else (QLogic, Broadcom, etc)

Aquantia is an unknown for me. As long as they dont suck, they'll probably go in tier 3.

On Ethernet, Intel is known for their little frills, stable line of NICs. That said, they have not been a leader since the jump to 10Gbps. Their 10Gbps line eventually came along and is solid, but it was a few years behind everyone else. That same story seems to be repeating itself at every new ethernet standard over the past decade.

Come to think of it, the last decade has been really bad for Intel. They no longer have a node advantage. They no longer have a performance advantage in any market space that I can think of outside of frequency hungry low-thread applications (games).

Their WiFi chips are good, but second tier. Their Modem chips are third tier. Their node is mostly on par with the competition, for now. Their CPUs are trading blows with AMD. Their ethernet chips are a generation behind. Optane is is a bright spot, but we'll see how they squander that.

The next big diversification play by Intel is GPUs, I have no idea how that will pan out.

I'm in the same situation.

I've already resigned myself that I must tell him to always check those minority boxes and he may want to consider only using his mother's surname on his resume, instead of the traditional dual surname he legally has (Example: Lopez, instead of Smith Lopez).