[jauntywundrkind]

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. :/

[transpute]

> not fit to be called PCIe devices

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.

[zaptrem]

> 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.

Source? Google turned up nothing.

[zxexz]

Sounds like some LLM hallucination to me.

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)

[-1] https://www.ieee802.org/11/email/stds-802-11-tgbe/msg00711.h... [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38811036 [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.04859 [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10467185 [3] https://www.nist.gov/publications/ieee-80211bf-enabling-wide...

[adrian_b]

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.

[transpute]

> Even if it is possible to implement such features

It has been possible for years with custom firmware, search "device free wireless sensing" in Google Scholar.

> they would not be incorporated in a communication standard at this time.

One would hope so, right?

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1088154/wifi-sen...

  When the new standard comes out in 2025, it will allow “every Wi-Fi device to easily and reliably extract the signal measurements,” Yang says. That alone should help get more Wi-Fi sensing products on the market. “It will be explosive,” Liu believes.. cases imagined by the committee include counting and finding people in homes or in stores, detecting children left in the back seats of cars, and identifying gestures, along with long-­standing goals like detecting falls, heart rates, and respiration.

  Wi-Fi 7, which rolls out this year, will open up an extra band of radio frequencies for new Wi-Fi devices to use, which means more channel state information for algorithms to play with. It also adds support for more tiny antennas on each Wi-Fi device, which should help algorithms triangulate positions more accurately. With Wi-Fi 7, Yang says, “the sensing capability can improve by one order of magnitude..”

  WiGig already allows Wi-Fi devices to operate in the millimeter-wave space used by radar chips like the one in the Google Nest.. [use cases include] reidentifying known faces or bodies, identifying drowsy drivers, building 3D maps of objects in rooms, or sensing sneeze intensity (the task group, after all, convened in 2020).. There is one area that the IEEE is not working on, at least not directly: privacy and security.

In advance of the IEEE 802.11bf standard, Intel implemented presence detection with WiFi 6E starting with 2023 Meteor Lake sensors and NPU, https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/7651...

   Intel Wi-Fi can intelligently sense when to lock or wake your laptop
   Walk Away Lock: Wi-Fi senses your departure & locks the PC in seconds
   Wake on Approach: Wi-Fi senses your return & wakes the PC in seconds

Intel Labs 2023 PoC demo of breathing detection, https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Tech-Innovation/Client/...

  The solution detects the rhythmic change in CSI due to chest movement during breathing. It then uses that information to detect the presence of a person near a device, even if the person is sitting silently without moving. The respiration rates gathered by this technology could play an important role in stress detection and other wellness applications.

> such an application would be equally implementable with any PCIe WiFi card conforming to the new standard

Yes, this would be possible on AMD, Qualcomm and other "AI" PCs.

Some Arm SoCs include NPUs that could be used by routers and other devices for WiFi sensing applications.

> looks like a hallucination or perhaps only a misinterpretation of proposed features

Is there a good term for reality conflicting with claims of hallucination and misinterpretation?

[zxexz]

> Is there a good term for reality conflicting with claims of hallucination and misinterpretation?

I can't think of a good one yet, I'm sure a year from now there will be one commonly used.

What triggered the assumption on my end (not the comment you're replying to) was your statement "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." - I initially couldn't find any good references, because Google was so filled with ChatGPT'd SEO spam (notable a bunch of circular references citing a Medium article, itself obviously LLM'd).

Apologies for my mistake there. You seem to know quite a bit about the subject. I'm definitely constantly on-guard with any claims these days, especially ones that have potentially terrifying implications, without a primary source.

[jauntywundrkind]

> They might be CNVi in M.2 form factor, with the rest of the "wifi card" inside the Intel SoC.

Already answered:

> And no these are not cnvio parts

(Oops, CNVi not cnvio.)

[transpute]

Which model number(s) exhibited this behavior?