I have had a few messages after I wrote the post here comparing the MS-01 and the MS-A2: Minisforum MS-A2 vs MS-01: Best Home Lab Server in 2025?. One of the questions that has been asked with the MS-A2 is whether or not it will support bifurcation. This was not a comparison point that I had in the blog post, mainly because we don't have that information as of yet on the MS-A2.
Bifurcation on the PCI-e slot will allow you to add a card that supports adding multiple NVMe drives as an example and have each one dedicated to a specific number of lanes. In other words, it allows you to carve up the available lanes you have to serve various devices, which is extremely handy in a home lab.
The Minisforum MS-01 with the PCI-e slot does not support bifurcation. Just so you know, I have a question into a contact with Minisforum currently on this capability with the MS-A2 and will post the official answer from them once I hear back as soon as possible.
However, in looking back and some of the official notes with the MS-01, it looks like the lack of bifurcation support on the MS-01 was directly related to limitations of the Alder Lake CPU. Here is a comment from one of the Minisforum staff: "Because of Intel’s CPU hardware limit, There is not possabile bifurcation on Alderlake-H platform CPU.(on that PCIE slot)". So according to this, it may have all related to the specific CPU.
My hope is that with the AM5 generation AMD with 16 cores, we won't see this limitation on bifurcation support. Read my full post on the bifurcation support on the MS-01 here: Does the Minisforum MS-01 support bifurcation with the PCI-e slot?
Update
If you have been following my Minisforum BD795M build, it uses the same processor as the forthcoming Minisforum MS-A2, the AMD 7945HX processor. I am pleased to say that it indeed looks to have bifurcation as a possibility! Take a look at the screenshot below which I think will be similar to what we will see with the Minisforum MS-A2:
