Their "PCIe" wifi cards "mysteriously" not working in anything but Intel systems is enraging.
I bought a wifi7 card & tried it in a bunch of non-Intel systems, straight up didn't work. Bought a wifi6 card and it sort of works, ish, but I have to reload the wifi module and sometimes it just dies. (And no these are not cnvio parts).
I think Intel has a great amazing legacy & does super things. Usually their driver support is amazing. But these wifi cards have been utterly enraging & far below what's acceptable in the PC world; they are not fit to be called PCIe devices.
Something about wifi really brings out the worst in companies. :/
They might be CNVi in M.2 form factor, with the rest of the "wifi card" inside the Intel SoC.
In CNVi, the network adapter's large and usually expensive functional blocks (MAC components, memory, processor and associated logic/firmware) are moved inside the CPU and chipset (Platform Controller Hub). Only the signal processor, analog and Radio frequency (RF) functions are left on an external upgradeable CRF (Companion RF) module which, as of 2019 comes in M.2 form factor.
Wifi7 has 3-D radar features for gestures, heartbeat, keystrokes and human activity recognition, which requires the NPU inside Intel SoC. The M.2 card is only a subset.
> Wifi7 has 3-D radar features for gestures, heartbeat, keystrokes and human activity recognition, which requires the NPU inside Intel SoC. The M.2 card is only a subset.
EDIT: Right after that I found another HN comment [0] by the same user (through a google search!)!
[-1] Interesting IEEE rfc email thread on related to preamble puncturing
misc (I have not yet read these through beyond the abstracts):
A preprint in ArXiV related to the proposed spec [1]
A paper in IEEE Xplore on 802.11bf [2]
NIST publication on 802.11bf [3] (basically [2] but on NIST)
The part about the supposed features of WiFi 7 looks like a hallucination or perhaps only a misinterpretation of proposed features.
How to do the actual sensing functions does not belong in a communication standard. What has been proposed, but I do not think that the standard amendment has been finalized, is to make some changes in the signals transmitted by WiFi stations, which would enable those desiring to implement sensing functions with the WiFi equipment to do that, without interfering with the normal communication functions.
So if Intel would create some program for Lunar Lake CPUs, possibly using the internal NPU, for purposes like detecting the room occupancy, that application would not be covered by the WiFi standard, the standard will just enable the creation of such applications and such an application would be equally implementable with any PCIe WiFi card conforming to the new standard, not only with an Intel CNVi card, whicd uses an internal WiFi controller.
However it is correct that there are 2 kinds of Intel WiFi cards that look the same (but they have different part numbers, e.g. AX200 for PCIe and AX201 for CNVi), but one kind of cards are standard PCIe cards that work in any computer, while the other kind of cards (CNVi) works only when connected to compatible Intel laptop CPUs.
I get them also in my Lunar Lake NUC. Usually in the browser, and presents as missing/choppy text oddly enough. Annoying but not really a deal breaker. Hoping it sorts out in the next couple kernel updates.
Give it some time. Probably needs updated drivers, intel and Linux have been rock solid for me too. If your hardware is really new it’s likely a kernel and time issue. 6.12 or 6.13 should have everything sorted.