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Comment by laweijfmvo | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

What's a "Ryzen-compatible" WiFi card?

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I think it means "Don't use an Intel AX201 Wifi Card because that needs an Intel CPU" without mentioning Intel.

I've used Intel AX cards on Ryzen (desktop) boards and it worked fine, you just need to install drivers via Windows Update.

That's not true though, is it?

Have an AX200 series wifi chip on an AM4 Motherboard, works well.

Using AX2XX on my Ryzen desktop too, works great. As far as I know that series of chipsets is one of the best available for Wifi/BT cards.

The *1’s use CPU offloading and only support Intel CPUs. The *0’s don’t.

AX201 only works with intel. AX200 should work in the AMD Framework as well.

Edit: Info from Intel itself https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

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.

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.

AFAIK there are two cards: the 2X0 and the 2X1.

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.

> Intel has put a part of card's hardware into a CPU and uses some non-standard interface between the card and the CPU?

Correct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi

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.

> 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?

yes

Seems to be just WiFi M.2 cards developed by MediaTek in collaboration of AMD[0], I guess the benefit would be additional verification/optimization.

[0]: https://www.amd.com/en/press-releases/2021-11-18-amd-and-med...

It could be a way to avoid saying Intel wifi card?

Probably a card that supports AMD-specific backdoors in Platform Security Processor, AMD's equivalent of IME.

As other comments have already explained, it means a card that uses plain PCIe and not one that requires Intel-specific weirdness.

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