In fact some people report that due to some hardware/bios combinations it sometimes happens even without touching the NIC, for example when adding unrelated hardware to the server or removing something else, sometime it is enough to change something in the BIOS e.g. update it.
Yes, I also learned that a bios update (the specre-stuff) changed the layout. Funny, because I never had problems on Linux servers renaming their network names, so the more predictiveness of the kernel is in my experience less accurate than doing it the old way (AFAIK doing nothing at all).