> If you're upgrading your Framework Laptop to the new Mainboard, remember that you'll need DDR5 SO-DIMMs up to DDR5-5600, along with a Ryzen-compatible RZ616 or similar WiFi card.
The 2x1 wifi card are intel specific while the 2x0 cards are CPU agnostic. As long as you have a card model ending in 0 you're fine to use any CPU.
As for why they did it I'd assume its slightly cheaper to build a 2x1 chip than a 2x0 as offloading the functions to the CPU would mean less components on the card itself. When you're selling 100s of millions of them every little bit counts.
The 1 only works with (recent enough) Intel CPUs, the 0 works with both. It's my understanding that some things are offloaded to the CPU on the 1 models, which older and non-Intel CPUs don't do.
I don't understand this, does it mean that Intel has put a part of card's hardware into a CPU and uses some non-standard interface between the card and the CPU? If not, then why cannot any other processor process the data? It's just bunch of numbers after all.
Yes. Intel has this interface called CNVi that puts only the RF stuff on the card and the rest of it in the SoC. This decouples things so you can swap in a newer radio protocol without having to throw away the rest of the implementation. Intel also markets a parallel line of wireless cards where everything is on a stick, for non-Intel or older Intel platforms.
However, in practice, it's not so clear that this works. The interface seems to have multiple versions, which aren't backwards compatible, meaning that a newer card won't work on an older CPU. For example, 201 and 211 cards don't work with an 8th gen cpu.
What's a "Ryzen-compatible" WiFi card?