Fascinating, the specs seem identical apart from the different interface. I wonder what's the purpose/advantage of the AX201.

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.

Why does it work only with Intel? Isn't WiFi card just an ordinary PCI-Express device?

> that the Intel® Wi-Fi 6 AX201 is a CRF module that uses the Intel proprietary interface

clearly not.

Some Intel cards offload work onto the CPU (or mobo?)

I think both. Chipset and CPU.