The orthogonality hasn’t meaningfully changed; what has is that they have more decoder engines to throw at a very busy (or potentially misleading-from-interference) set of sub-IF’s. In theory that makes it slightly more able to leverage the orthagonality; in practice I doubt it matters. Though it occurs to me I could probably engineer a stress test comparison…
Really what seems to have happened is that they went to a more modern silicon process where they could fit more logic at drastically less power - the lower operating voltage is a hint of that too.
My clients dream of solar, so we’re going in the 1302 direction for power alone… question is if we try to squeeze it all on an MCU to cut power there. One of these days I’m going to see if I can underclock the Linux SOC, being a packet forwarder is pretty low intensity.