Stefan Mileschin

Quantenna was the first to bring a 4x4 MU-MIMO 802.11ac chipset to the market (with the Asus RT-AC87U and the Netgear Nighthawk X4 R7500). It has a number of Wave 2 features, but notably lacked support for 160 MHz channels. Qualcomm Atheros was the second vendor to support MU-MIMO, with the launch of the QCA 9980, 9982, 9990 and 9992 in April 2014. In the meanwhile, Broadcom appeared to miss the Wave 2 bandwagon. Instead, citing lack of MU-MIMO client devices as one particular reason, they opted to push the XStream platform with two discrete 5 GHz radios. This made for some interesting products such as the Netgear Nighthawk X6 R8000. CES 2015 was the ideal time for the silicon vendors to jostle for the pole position, and we weren't disappointed. All the major vendors (and a few of their customers) had interesting announcements at CES 2015.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8862/q...h-new-chipsets