Will it? I'm not aware of any other than the HP workstation. Maybe one or two of the Chinese mini PC manufacturers. But nothing you can buy as a mini-ITX motherboard.
Of course you will. Asus et al have heard the buzz, have the connections, and can spin up a product far quicker than the 5-9 or months before Strix Halo is available.
It's soldered RAM, which is a fantastic trade-off for specific scenarios (inference). If all you care about is local inference, this thing is basically the same price as a 5090 (I think?) with multiple times the memory, and no need to purchase "everything else" (mobo, CPU, etc.) alongside. And given that home inference will typically be serving a single user at once, a handful at worst, you really have no need for a GPU. I'm guessing that this product will be uniquely positioned for quite a long time.
For every other use-case? Yeah, just get a desktop.
It seems to be squaring up directly against the mac studio with its efficient APU and big memory bandwidth use cases with a cheaper price tag. At least that's the loose sense that I got based on their keynote.
It's a bit different. Digits is based on the Tegra CPU, which is an ARM chip with integrated nvidia GPU. It's nearly COTS (commercial off the shelf), but not quite. Tegra CPU support isn't in mainline linux, so you have to run their fork of Ubuntu or build your own kernel. The integrated GPU is a special class in nvidia drivers, and some things just don't work on it (they only work on a discrete GPU) for seemingly no reason too.
Keep in mind the digits is part of their server line and server OS, not the random embedded dev kits often used for developers targeting car entertainment systems and often with abandoned kernel + driver.
The nvidia digits uses DGOS, same as their grace+hopper and similar enterprise/cloud products.
Can you expand on this? If I want to run open-weight LLMs and image generation models in the next few years, how likely is it that I will be able to run the "most popular" models (whatever they will be 12 months from now) if I buy Digits?
Right - there was no major market gap here. With laptops there was, but not desktops. Not sure the point of this. I hope they didn't spend too much eng time on it, rather than on their laptops. The F16 could use a new rev...
If that was available when I started to build my homelab server, I'd have bought it. My requirements were a low-power but modern and punchy mini-ITX board with an AMD processor in a very compact build with a 48v DC power supply and SmartOS.
That was basically unobtainium and I've compromised down to a AliExpress mini-ITX motherboard with a mobile AMD CPU, a AM5 heatsink and firmware that is... flavorful, powered by a screaming TFX power supply crammed in an absurdly tight 3.8L noname case running on Proxmox (when you start reconfiguring PCI Express bridges through the serial port kernel debugger because that's just about the only device the Illumos kernel enumerated at all on what is supposed to be your main server, it's time to give up on SmartOS).
It works, but it's a little box of pure hatred and heresy that's quite far off from what I've wanted initially. It is actually an improvement over my previous main server, somehow.
No offense but your requirements make very little sense for that use case, unless you really needed PCI-Express.
I’d have bought a Beelink or similar mini PC if I wanted small size and low power along with low price. You lose some modularity compared to ITX boards but I am almost certain you spent more money and deal with more noise and maybe even more power consumption.
For me personally my homelab PC is just an ATX mid tower in the closet because those parts are dirt cheap and you can get lots of performance with essentially infinite modularity.
Originally, the homelab was supposed to be located inside a 6U, 30cm deep, encased 19" rack. That would fit flush and very snugly just below my encased electrical panel, located right at the entrance inside my apartment.
That makes noise (a glass panel separates the rack from the entrance), power (can't risk overheating in an enclosed closet) and space (6U and 25cm of usable depth is an exceedingly small volume for a homelab) all important factors at the same time. I also wanted at least 2.5 Gib Ethernet, as much DDR5 RAM and CPU cores as I could chuck into it and two NVMe slots. I rejected a mini PC due to noise concerns and I wanted standardized parts and modularity.
I have a AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS, 64 GiB of RAM and terabytes of NVMe in less than 4 liters of volume without sacrificing modularity. I've mounted an AMD Wraith Stealth, which is a comically oversized CPU cooling fan for a 35W TDP thermal load. It's fast, small, silent, overkill and still fits standard parts.
I do want to get rid of the ridiculously noisy TFX power supply at some point, most likely for a 48v DC ATX power supply. Unfortunately, since I like stupid ideas I want a fully 48v DC powered rack and Power-over-Ethernet throughout my apartment to get rid of as many power supplies and fans as I can. I've started accumulating parts for it (like a 48v 2.5 Gib 10 port PoE switch, PoE powered gigabit switches and PoE-to-12VDC adapters), but I'm still not sure how I'll pull it off in the end since I'm way off the beaten path.
At this point you're probably wondering why I do things that way. I'm not sure myself, but seeing what I tend to do for fun it's probably best not to ask, lest the universe stops its suspension of disbelief while I'm in the middle of performing yet another heretical act on some poor unsuspecting piece of hardware or software.
Actually the more I think about it, it really just sounds like you should move to a mini-ITX case that uses an SFX power supply.
Those specs all seem totally attainable in a mini PC, although something with an equivalent chip and dual nvme slots is up in the $800-1000 range.
Maybe it would be louder? I don’t think they have a reputation for being loud though? I certainly can’t hear the one I’m using as a router, but it has a lower load profile than my main server.
I have a small apartment too but I might be lucky with my deep half height closet where I can shove equipment back there.
It boils down to a pet peeve of mine that requires more context.
A former sysadmin job gave me a deep disdain for 40mm fans and modern 1U/2U off-the-shelf AC powered servers. It's a technological dead-end that is a legacy of old datacenter architectures that no longer make sense to continue. A holistic blade-based DC powered datacenter eliminates much of the inefficiencies inherent to that legacy AC design.
Now, I'm not aiming to do a high-density homelab and regardless how cool they are, an Oxide Computer rack is about three orders of magnitude out of reach across several metrics. That being said, I think a DC powered homelab can enjoy a lot of the benefits.
For example, I have one 10 Gib switch, three gigabit switches (one per room), a Synology NAS and a Android TV player. With AC that's six power supplies, each taking a dedicated outlet for less than 60W combined. With PoE I can power all of that directly from my 10 Gib switch. That's five less power supplies and also gets rid of the power strips.
Or take a 250W ATX power supply. On AC it requires transformers, full bridge rectifiers, big bulky capacitors, DC-to-DC converters and most likely a fan. On DC it requires just the DC-to-DC converters, with modern power electronics that's doable at a fraction of the volume and without the fan because the actual power supply is upstream and potentially shared across multiple equipments.
I might have an affinity for doing stupid and insane projects, but it does come from a thoughtful position. If I ever pull it off, hopefully it can show that we don't have to endure outdated and legacy designs forever even within the comfort of our homes. Alas, I'm busy doing other cursed things at the moment so I just put that angry little server in a spare room for now.
You can get a M3/M4 Max with 128 GB of RAM as well. The Studio will give you > 128 GB.
I have a max with 64GB RAM, which is good enough for 70b models with a 3 bit quant. Even if I had more RAM to run larger models, my GPU would be the bottleneck.
> You can get a M3/M4 Max with 128 GB of RAM as well.
To get an M4 Max so you can have 128GB, you need a macbook pro. The cheapest macbook pro with 128GB is $4700.
M4 Max does have the benefit of more memory controllers, so it has twice as much memory bandwidth as Ryzen AI Max. But that's a lot of money to pay for it.
I hate to be a hater, but having built myriad gaming PCs in my time, this doesn't really seem like much of a step forward. I'm hoping it's just the beginning. I'd love a modular plug-and-play PC parts ecosystem. This doesn't seem like that, yet.
Imagine being able to swap components between their laptops and desktops! That would be pretty cool. Not sure how practically useful, but cool nonetheless.
It's actually a pretty nice system when you're trying to purchase something. You have a reasonable estimate of when you'll be at the front of the queue, and when that time comes, you're more likely to be able to complete your transaction because the site isn't overwhelmed.
It would obviously be better if they could limit it to something like `store.frame.work`, rather than putting a queue in front of their entire site…
This makes zero sense, absolutely ever. Magento was able to properly cache the view-only parts like 15 years ago. No matter the traffic spikes, serving read requests shouldn’t require hour-long waiting times for visitors.
When money is involved and customers want to make payments to a limited resource (which the release batches are) I think being extra careful is quite important.
The framework website currently has a strange message about putting users into queues just to view the homepage. Might be time to start thinking about setting up Varnish
I should still be able to click around the pages to browse the products, even if full cart functionality isn't there.
Whoever is in charge of that website gets an L.
For that matter, it makes me reconsider my hosting of things with Cloudflare. I know nothing about framework's site's configuration, but I know I don't want my site to have a waiting line like that.
edit: also, the timer went down and then went back up, so I have thoughts about this enterprise Cloudflare feature.
It's a feature you have to activate and it's only available to Business/Enterprise sites, you're not at any risk of it showing up unless you want it to.
until the user logs in, the cart functionality is implanted client side with cookies, and incurs no db hit.
guess it's true what they say about hardware vs software. you gotta pick one to be good at, and the other is going to suffer for it, to varying degrees. (inb4 someone mentions Apple. Apple is a hardware company. Their software's alright but it's full of bugs and they're simply not as good as it as they are with hardware.)
I assume you're going to skip marketing material and go straight to "build my own" or whatever they call it. I assume they didn't expect such influx in site visitors.
E-commerce is hard. I worked at a company where we could use 1% of infra at its peak every day of the year except 15-20 days. We knew exactly when floodgates will open, and we still would suffer extra high latency or even downtime.
you're right but loading the front page at http://frame.work shouldn't incur the "build your own" hit.
e-commerce is hard. that's why we get paid so well. hiring the smartest teenager that your nephew knows to setup some bullshit for $15/hr vs hiring a senior SRE at $100+/hr, when it directly leads to lost sales is a choice.
the senior part also comes after having failed to scale in production, and learning the lessons there, leading to a site that stays up on the next black Friday/cyber Monday, and stands up to various ddos attacks. (this was before Cloudflare, mind you)
Framework is great because they took an entshittified category and made a good and repairable product in it, upgradeable in a way the other vendors refused to enable. That was the laptop. Now they made a less repairable desktop PC. This brings nothing to the market.
The soldered ram is particularly unacceptable. I get and believe that they could not make it work otherwise, but then they should have stopped the product instead of just adding to the e-waste.
There's no other way to get 256 GB/s of memory bandwidth for this cheap, and that's quite valuable in many workloads. I'm curious to get one for compiling code too.
You can get similar bandwidth with server boards that cost 5-10x as much, or with a Mac Studio that costs 2.5x as much.
CAMM will be fine on laptops and other smaller form factor devices for CPU-class memory speeds, but it does not have the bus width or lanes to match solutions like Strix Halo, Grace, Apple M-series -- the memory bandwidth being a large part of their appeal. Increasing the bus width on CAMM modules is going to compromise many of the other advantages.
The problem is that these are integrated shared-memory systems with a single RAM pool. That's nice for a lot of reasons, but GPUs need many more memory channels and larger bus widths than CPUs do in order to do work and remain fed at a reasonable power draw. It's an inherent design trade off. I don't see a CAMM style solution for GPU memory coming anytime soon except on the low end.
Sounds promising, hope it's true, much like a mac studio with the m2 max. Otherwise a 128GB amd strix with 256GB/sec memory bandwidth for $2k looks good.
> You can get similar bandwidth with server boards
Could be wrong, but I don't think you can. The bandwidth limit, AFAIK, is a problem with the DDR5 spec. These soldered solutions can go faster specifically because they aren't DDR5.
Please don't misused channels. In DDR4 1 channel was 64 bits. In DDR5 1 channel is 32 bits. So a 128 bit wide DDR4 system had 2 channels, but a 128 bit wide DDR5 system has 4 channels.
The latest AMD server is 12 DIMMS wide, but has 24 channels of DDR5.
A Mac mini with an M4 Pro and 64GB of memory has the same bandwidth and costs £1,999, compared to £1,750 for the Framework Desktop when factoring in the minimum costs for storage, tiles, and necessary expansion cards.
One thing to note on the more RAM: for the 128GB option, my understanding is that the GPU is limited to using only 96GB [1]. In contrast, on Macs, you can safely increase this to, for example, 116GB using `sysctl`.
Apologies, I stand corrected. Do you have a reference for this? I'm genuinely curious why the 96GB "limit" is so frequently cited - I assumed it must be a hardware limitation.
It can go higher actually, just that when I setup my test devices I had a "ought to be enough for everyone" moment when typing `options amdgpu gttsize=110000`. I guess this number spread too far, heh.
The soldered ram was necessary for Strix Halo. There is a large group of people who really want Strix Halo, and are willing to pay for it. There is no reason they should have avoided making this product.
(The 32GB config is silly, though. With that little RAM, there is nothing it does better than a cheaper machine with a discrete GPU.)
There is a reason and I think my prior comment made it clear: When your declared purpose is to limit e-waste, making a new product that does not foster that goal risks alienating the people you won with your purpose description.
In the LTT video the framework CEO explains that AMD wasn't able to make LPCAMM work because of signal integrity over the bus reasons.
But 2000 dollars for up to 110GB of VRAM in Linux makes this a VERY interesting little machine, so much that the framework website has a cloudflare queue right now...
Better to think of it as a competitor to Mac Studio & Nvidia Digits, which are much less repairable by comparison. The soldered memory is an unfortunate reality of these "unified" memory systems.
The only way to get a traditional desktop with 96GB of VRAM is to spend upwards of $10K loading it up with 2-4 GPUs.
I just wish they could provide additional options:
1) have ram soldered but provide also extra 1 slot for LPCAMM/LPDIMM ram. Soldered RAM would be used for GPU but external slower ram still could be used for non GPU related stuff (software) that doesn't require high bandwidth/latency.
2) I think motherboard will have 4 pads for ram and if you buy less 1-3 pads will be just having pins without chip. If they would sell memory chips and provide some tooling/documentations for specialised/certified shop they could solder those. You could still upgrade just not by yourself.
A big product category that is developing right now is hobbyists running LLMs on their own computers - more likely desktops rather than laptops. I presume they want to build expertise and market in this category, and that is why they think the compromise is worth it.
There was no way to make it upgradable because of the architecture of the chip itself. They had no choice, but they are still delivering exceptional value in this design.
The bandwidth still doesn't quite compare to a GPU, and 128GB doesn't fit DeepSeek R1, however. If they bump it to 512GB for $5000 or so, that will disrupt the market.
256GB/s is on par with the M4 Pro at a much lower price.
You could run R1 671B using unsloth’s quantized version that fits in <80GB. Not sure why that would be a benchmark though, there’s nothing that can run the model at full precision right now except for (very slow) server hardware.
> You’ve gotta deal with amd’s AI software stack though
Not if you are using the CPU. I am under the impression most inference use cases are memory bandwidth limited, not compute limited, so running on the GPU would gain you little to nothing unless the GPU has faster access to the shared memory.
With what memory bandwidth? Remember, without e.g. speculative decoding you need to read the entire model and KV cache for every token. Let's be extremely generous and say you get 512GB/sec in memory bandwidth, on par with a high end M4 MacBook Pro. This means you can only read the entire DRAM 4 times a second, generating at most 4 tokens per second. Smaller models will of course run proportionally faster, but 128GB isn't by itself a sufficient statistic to say whether this is "theoretically awesome" or not.
What's frustrating is there's no real reason why regular DDR5 can't reach 1TB/sec with a sufficient number of channels. The manufacturers are just holding it back to drip feed that memory bandwidth over several generations. Except for Apple, which lets you have 800GB/sec now, and will let you have 1TB/sec+ in M5 Ultra next year. It's $$$$, but still - the true alternatives are much less cost effective.
It can be relatively cheap too under the constraints imposed by typical AI workloads, at least when it comes to getting to a 1TB/s or so. All you need is high-spec DDR5 and _a ton_ of memory channels in your SOC. During transformer inference you will easily be able to use those parallel, multichannel reads. I get why you'd need HBM and several TB/s of memory bandwidth for extremely memory intensive training workloads. But for inference 1TB/s gives you a lot to work with (especially if your model is a MoE), and it doesn't have to be ultra expensive.
Reserved one of the updated base model 13’s. Battery life for this gen of Ryzen seems solid in other laptops so I’m hoping it’ll do reasonably well at stretching the FW13’s 61Wh battery for low intensity tasks, particularly in power save mode under Linux.
I really want to get a Framework to replace my aging IdeaPad, but they don't ship to my region yet.
I was planning on ordering the 7840U version to where I'm staying in a trip to the US, but now it feels a bit of a let down to order a last-gen model since the new one might not arrive in time for my trip in mid-April.
Be careful with this because framework will not warranty your product in any way, and given their size and age, there is a not insignificant chance you will experience a product defect or failure and have no recourse, love my framework but I experienced a mainboard bricking after a failed firmware update, which framework addressed under warranty. I would caution against buying without a warranty.
I had a coat with large side pockets just big enough to fit the 11" air. Not that I would ever use them for that, but it sure felt nice to have the option...
Thanks a lot for that link! I know nothing of Apple stuff and a friend has got an old iMac that he thought was unupdatable but it seems there's a way. Cheers!
Same here. The 12" Macbook Retina was just about the perfect laptop size and weight, just had not enough HP, and obviously not serviceable in the same way as Framework.
yeah that's tough to get right even on a 14" 1440P is almost too much (problem is scaling, particularly with external monitor and your laptop, depends on OS)
I also have a 13.5" 3000x2000 laptop and it uses 200% scaling, fractional is blurry. Initially I was trying to use Ubuntu but the extend monitor scaling was so bad (Chromium, VS Code), just decided to stick with Windows for this device.
No, it is not. It would be perfect for a 6'' phone, maybe. The goal is to have at least double the pixel density, and my 2016 tablet can reach this ( ~2700x1800 at 12'' ).
Even Surfaces have been using 1440p at 12'' since 2016, and 2880 x 1920 since 2018! Why would Android & Apple tablets at much smaller screen size have higher DPIs, if 1080p was perfect? Do you expect to put Android tablets closer to your face than x86 tablets for some reason?
Sigh... since when has DPI started _decreasing_ again? I refuse to accept this trend, in the same way it was stupid back in the 2000s when LCDs became a thing.
The human hardware isn't getting any better, so we must accept that there exists some upper bound beyond which improving resolution isn't a selling point for most people, especially given the necessary tradeoffs in battery life, processing power, memory usage, and input latency it entails. Now consider that this ceiling may have been hit 20 years ago, and that the continued dominance of 1920x1080 may not be because manufacturers are lazy, but because most people are happy enough with it.
It's not. Finding the ceiling is always going to involve overshooting the ceiling and then walking back from there. It sounds as though you're not willing to consider even the possibility that this may be the effective end of progress for this combination of technology and use case, at least for values of "progress" that involve increasing resolution, rather than values that involve decreasing cost.
Or rather it sounds as someone misreading me again as asking for "progress" when I'm just asking not to skimp over on what was already offered 10 years ago and practically everyone else still offers today.
The Steam Hardware Survey shows that 1920x1080 is still the majority resolution, and that's among an audience that's inordinately populated by technological enthusiasts. The fact that people are seemingly dead-set on sticking to 1920x1080 despite--as you point out--the availability of alternatives only further strengthens the argument that the majority of consumers just don't particularly value higher resolutions.
Note that I game at 1080p (or worse), even on my setup with dual 4k monitors (because it is also over 10 years old), so neither shows up on steam survey as anything other than 1080p (which also puts dual setups at a different category). Gaming at 1080p or even higher still requires thousands on GPUs which I'm not willing to do. However simply having more than 1080p for desktop usage is accessible and has been so for over 10 years. A 4k monitor costs a fraction of what a gaming GPU costs. My desktop iGPU from 2014 has zero problems driving 2x4k. It also does so with the system consuming less than 60W from the wall at usage (lower than some laptop CPUs do these days).
If you want to play the useless popularity game, go and check what are the resolutions on the phones and tablets with even smaller screens sold in the last 10 years (which exceeds the number of laptops by far), and even friggin' eink notepads.
"The fact" is people today would never accept sub-retina dpis even for cheap phones, and the market has clearly spoken. "The fact" is your arguments about human perception are utter bullshit (as trivially disproven as todays arguments about 60fps), and remind me of the discussions I had when forced to use 60fps 800x600 TN screens (pure hell on earth) after having used 1280 at 90hz for ages with CRTs, all in the name of "progress".
> so neither shows up on steam survey as anything other than 1080p
The hardware survey doesn't occur while games are running. It's recording the display setting of your desktop, which would put you and everyone like you in the 4K bucket.
> If you want to play the useless popularity game, go and check what are the resolutions on the phones and tablets with even smaller screens sold in the last 10 years
I have a rather new high-end phone. Its native resolution is 2400x1080, and that 2400 is only there because phones have a particularly long aspect ratio compared to other devices.
> "The fact" is people today would never accept sub-retina dpis even for cheap phones, and the market has clearly spoken.
1920x1080 is a wildly popular resolution. You appear to be frustrated that the market hasn't spoken in your favor.
> "The fact" is your arguments about human perception are utter bullshit
You appear to be hallucinating arguments that I haven't made.
They have not done that for years? That used to be a thing 5 years ago or so, but nowadays battery saving mode just forces 60 hz refresh rate but otherwise does not change the resolution. I do not buy top of the line devices so I do not know for sure, but mine has >1080p and keeps the resolution for sure.
And, to give an idea of what are we talking about, even in such power saving modes these much smaller and older phones still have more pixels than a 1080p screen.
It's higher DPI than a 24" 4K monitor. It is plenty dense, especially for a battery powered device where the power needed to drive the display is a real consideration.
That's why this has half the resolution of my current same size 12'' tablet, even though my current device has also half the battery capacity, and likely costed half than this thing will cost.
Even if you use today's prices, the cheapest iPad has almost double the resolution. No, 1080p at 12'' it is not plenty dense. You do not put this smaller thing as far from your face as a 24'' monitor.
Triple the DPI? Are you doing the calculations right? The DPI of this screen is 189. The iPad Standard, Air, and Pro at 11 and 13 inches have a DPI of 264. The iPad Mini is a standout at 326 DPI, which is 1.72x the DPI.
You are correct; I am using number of horizontal lines rather than computing the actual DPI. But this barely changes my argument, since even when they are at screens of similar size cheap iPads have double the number of horizontal lines. I have updated my post to reflect that.
The way to analyze this is using pixel density: 1900x1200 on a 12" display is only 187 PPI, which is frustratingly below the "retina" range at the usual distance of a laptop screen (much less a tablet one, and this one is part tablet). The resolution you want for a 12" screen is 2560x1600, which is also 16:10 but at a much more usable 251 PPI.
That’s approximately 189 ppi, which calls for a 1.5× scaling factor. (For these sorts of devices, 1× should be around 110–140ppi.)
Fractional scaling isn’t great. Windows handles it the best by a large margin (it’s really quite respectable; honestly I’d just call it “not ideal” rather than “not great” if restricting to Windows), and has done for many years. macOS doesn’t even try, but rather downsamples from the next integer, which guarantees it will be atrocious, much worse than a lower-resolution integer-scaled panel for many purposes. Linux can be finicky, but is slowly getting there, though downsampling is still common. (Me, I’ve been using Linux/Sway at 1.5× for the last five years.)
You’d get much better results by increasing density by a third in each direction: 2560×1600 is 252ppi, excellent for a 2× scaling factor. (The effective resolution is thus 1280×800.)
For me it's the perfect resolution on a laptop currently. I don't need a higher resolution and by not unnecessarily increasing it I get better performance, better battery life and a lower cost.
It's likely chosen for cost. There's a couple of brand new fairly cheap laptops with exactly the same screens on paper and a few other similar sized laptops that are in the ballpark.
Skimming Google, there are pretty much are no laptops 12" and higher resolution than 1080x1200 that's current nor made by Apple.
On sibling thread I already mention the Surface Pro (convertible) at 12'' and it's 2880 x 1920. The next 2025 convertible that I found, Latitude 7350, is also 2880 x 1920 (at 13'', though). In fact, most of the 12'' convertibles with 1080p are either sub$800 (which I doubt this thing is) or come from Lenovo (whom you really do NOT want to compare with regarding screen quality -- https://www.notebookcheck.net/Enough-with-the-cheap-screens-... ).
And let's not get started on 12'' Android tablets...
That model of Surface is nearing almost 8 years old by now. Not current by my standards. I'm thinking about the chance of existing tooling still being around to make a screen and slap into a laptop rather than if it existed at one point.
But yes, considering that Framework's Chromebook is/was expensive (over $1k) for the class doesn't give a lot of faith that the 12in model would be any different. Though that was equipped with a 2k screen and had a 12th gen i5, so I genuinely wonder what kind of meetings happened to ship out a premium Chromebook (a segment that does not exist)
The last Surface model is less than one month old. The chassis was updated less than 2 years ago ( and to reduce the screen margins, no less ), and the resolution was improved again.
I can see that you have strong feelings about it, but let's be honest, this is perfect resolution for the laptop. And since it is Framework, they might have upgrade in the future.
I think I would primarily used the 12 inch as I don't personally find the screen space to 13 inches that significant an increase in size and I would find a benefit to having a 2 in 1 that utilises a stylus especially if it works well with Linux. I feel that form factor is better for travelling to and from work as well as on trains and planes.
I am not sure if I would keep the 13 inch and use it exclusively indoors or if I will sell it.
I know the comment you're replying to called it a "180 degree hinge", but the linked Ars Technica article states that it "flips around to the back with a flexible hinge, a la Lenovo's long-running Yoga design". This is not clear from the pictures in the article, but was on display during the livestreamed event earlier today.
It's sort of obvious if you've seen the Panasonic implementation like in CF-RZ line, it's the same setup. The top and bottom halves are connected through a pair of square pieces long as the laptop's thickness. Hinges each articulate 180 degrees to total 360 degrees to allow it to fold like a human knee joint.
The four hinges must stay synchronized under lift force from the user, but I haven't seen that being a problem on a Let's note, so it's probably good.
I would expect similar to any convertible thinkpad. I personally don't mind it but due to the back light there is a gap between the end of the pen and the line which does affect the experience. If a paperlike film is produced, that would improve the situation.
Oh, that's far more interesting to me than the desktop thing. I have a 13" Framework now, but a 12" would be super-nice as a travel laptop -- and the tablet conversion might let me use it as a on-the-go ebook reader.
I've been looking at a Raspberry Pi 5 paired w/ a Wacom One Gen 2 13 inch screen or a Movink 13 --- will probably stick with that since I prefer Wacom EMR (and have a big investment in it in terms of devices and styluses).
Definitely! ROCm is getting really solid for inference. LM Studio (and therefore the underlying llama.cpp) work out of the box already, and we see AMD pushing forward on PyTorch and other areas rapidly.
Well, different people are fascinated by different things. :) I hope both products are successful, they've been (so far) a force for good in the industry as far as I can tell.
You could mod one into the hardware if you really wanted. The drivers for the Magic Trackpad are pretty much flawless on Linux, you could engineer your own plug-and-play solution with COTS hardware if you found the motivation.
Why would you want haptic trackpads? Having used modern Macbook trackpads they feel like a massive downgrade compared to either of my Frameworks. The vibration-based simulation of haptics feels uncanny and unsatisfying compared to the real deal.
Why would you want a diving board trackpad? Every single non haptic trackpad I've tried always sucks, requiring excessive force to press a button, particularly if you're not on the very bottom of the doving board mechanism of the trackpad.
With diving board trackpads, I usually just tap to click.
Physically pressing down a diving board is just asking for frustration. Sometimes I miss the separate left, right, and middle click buttons under the trackpad like the old days.
If you pretend that the click buttons are still there, you can press down a diving board just fine. You use your fingers to move, and the thumb to click. The problem is that this is totally unintuitive to anyone who grew up without visible buttons.
Strongly disagree. MacBook haptic trackpads feel plenty natural to me and don’t suffer the weird inconsistency issues that plague traditional trackpads. I say this even as someone who uses a machine with a traditional trackpad everyday and has a new FW13 reserved. If Framework ever offered a haptic trackpad upgrade I’d buy it.
> ...the first Framework Laptop 12 motherboard is going to use Intel's 13th-generation Core i3 and i5 processors
I _really_ hope they launch an AMD version (perhaps with an iGPU) soon after that.
That and preferably with Libreboot support. This would make it the ideal portable laptop for me and thus I'd be able to (finally!) replace my X220T.
I don't know about the GP. I won't buy anything from Intel unless things change dramatically. My last Intel laptop had serious thermal throttling problem that could be completely avoided if Intel cared a bit about users. The one before had some other problems. In past 20 years, anytime I bought (or was given by a company) AMD I was happy, and as time goes by I get less and less happy with Intel.
Framework shipped AMD 7040-series and 13th-gen Core i-series alongside each other for the 13.
The 13th-gen Intels had miserable battery life and heat issues under load. If you could manage that, all four USB-C ports were full Thunderbolt ports equally capable of driving displays, PD, and USB 4 throughput.
The AMD line had considerably better performance-per-watt but rougher firmware support (and early on, really broken Linux kernel support that required Fedora or other rolling kernel release distros). It also couldn't deliver the same "every port does everything" promise that the Intel boards did, with some ports not supporting displays or USB 4, which significantly reduced the value of the expansion-card model to kind of a novelty.
On the 12, if it's likely also going to have a smaller batter than the 13, going only with 13th-gen Intels means it likely will be either a further step back in battery life vs. the 13 or throttled to extend the battery.
The issue isn't TDP so much as performance-per-watt. The equivalent Ryzen 5 PRO 7540U can run at the same base TDP, had 2 full and four 4c cores on a smaller die, and outperformed the 1334U almost across the board.
Both chips were Q1 '23, so the timing's not a great excuse. They were in HP's 2023 EliteBook G10 840 (1334U) and 845 (Ryzen 5 PRO 7540) laptops, and the 845 was better on both single- and especially multi-thread Cinebench R23, _much_ better in GPU loads and gaming, _and also_ lasted longer on battery.
I think Framework mostly just wants to target an education market with a mainboard experience that's lower maintenance than AMD has been for them. Fewer USB-C restrictions, less firmware drama.
Still hard to get excited about it being the _only_ available option, though.
I would suppose they got a good deal on them, as they're a little out of date, but they're good enough, and overall provide a good package. If you're trying to hit a price point, there will always be compromises.
i don't know about other people's experience - but my framework with intel cpu is always running that fan relatively maxed out even when it's not doing anything. And it has massive issues staying asleep which is some sort of driver issue with Windows. But I can be an airport and all of a sudden my backpack feels like it's about to combust and i can hear my laptop fan rippin', even though it should be asleep.
That is by design, it's a feature from Intel and Microsoft called "modern standby." It basically means your laptop cannot actually sleep anymore. Instead, it enters a slightly-lower-power mode so that it can download emails in the background, run Windows updates in the middle of the night, and generally pretend to be a phone even though no one wants that and the hardware/os was not really designed for it.
Modern Standby requires that deepest sleep states take less power than S3 standby, the issue is mainly drivers and applications either waking the system or not putting peripherals into deep enough sleep (or shutting them down entirely if possible)
Some new laptops cannot actually fully suspend to ram. It sounds crazy but I had this issue even after installing Linux on a laptop. It’s a hardware limitation. You can thank Microsoft for trying to make sure they can sneak in OS updates when you think your laptop is asleep.
It's not sneaking in OS updates, it's faster wake-up mainly.
Combined with properly prepared HW taking less power in modern standby than in S3, but it requires hardware/firmware/driver/userland confluence to work well
I'm not sure I had the same issue, it is a different laptop, but it would not go to sleep. The current solution is to make it hybernate instead of sleep.
just an anecdata but recently I was building a HTPC/NAS. Initially I wanted N100 for pure NAS, but ended up with an 5500 AMD and I was blown away by the capabilities of IGPU. Turned out to be a quite capable gaming machine.
And a 2-in-1 laptop in tent mode would be perfect for (casual) gaming on the train with a gamepad; much more ergonomic than holding one of the many heavy gaming handhelds.
Libreboot would be amazing progress for moving open-source downwards in the stack.
It feels odd having a load of closed source EFI stuff and then putting linux on top of it.
Sure linux injects a bunch of firmware into hardware later in the boot, but it's still progress
I am a fan of open source and being able to tinker etc. But I've never felt the need (advantage?) to do more than just use the bios/efi to boot or configure a few basics.
I've been burned by a small SBC that had poor support, but on laptops/desktops never felt limited.
But people always sound so excited to libreboot their personal computer... Am I missing out or is it just nerd cred?
I'd say that after numerous revelations in regards to UEFI vulnerabilities and such, an open source BIOS / EFI has become a necessity for me rather than something just nice to have.
I don’t quite get why framework focuses so much on Intel and AMD. ARM laptops are in the rise, and don’t need active cooling. It’s hard for me to think of upgrading to another laptop with fans when so many fanless (I.e.: silent) options are available.
Strix Point AMD laptop CPUs are just better than non-Apple ARM CPUs across the board, and don't have the whole host of compatibility issues. There isn't really any point to them.
They are a fairly small company, and going for amd/intel means reaching the widest audience.
Linux on arm is very mature, but windows on arm not completely.
That being said, other companies could very well develop and sell boards for the frameworks laptop. So much so that iirc sifive did release a risc-v laptop board to use in the frameworks laptop case.
Is Windows on ARM still immature? I'd think with the Microsoft Surface (ARM processors for several years now) that Windows on ARM would be fine but I've never owned or used one so I don't have any anecdotal evidence, just my assumptions.
My brother is on the Windows side of the world (MS partner and all that, lots of CRM/DB work). He said if you stick to mainstream apps (MS apps, Adobe, etc) ARM is basically on parity with x86, tho not the performance choice. He said these days he rarely has customers come with support issues that boil down to "bug only occurs on ARM", though "it's slow on ARM" does come up. OTOH...If you have specialty/niche apps that you rely on, or apps from a small dev who doesn't have the resources to support 2 archs, your mileage may vary.
Linux on arm is actually pretty terrible outside of the server space due to their (Qualcomm, Imagination, and ARM) integrated GPUs being bad and having terrible drivers.
To the best of my knowledge the ARM ecosystem is an absolute pain to work in, you can get Phone/Tablet SoCs painfully encumbered with out of date drivers and binary blobs. Or you can get enormous server processors that will cost $1000+. There just isn't much that's suitable for making a desktop or laptop that would meet Frameworks markets expectations.
And even Microsoft is dealing with pain points like Qualcomm he, few, and drivers actually breaking the spec and causing problems in servicing and supporting the ARM based devices.
Meanwhile properly SBSA compliant chips aren't targeted at mobile market at all and thus often lack certain features or are too energy hungry.
They don't seem to care about needing a fan, and the community on their forums is actively hostile--even brutal--to people who don't want a fan (the zeitgeist there seems to believe that any compromise to performance at all costs is incompetence). It is particularly frustrating as you don't even have to go ARM to drop the fan: there are chips even from Intel that do not need fans, such as any of the ones in all of the 12" laptops I have used for the past dozen or so years (including the one I am using right now, which also happens to have a much much better screen than this new Framework: a Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 360, whose only flaw is it doesn't have enough RAM).
So they're exactly like the gaming PC community. "Decibels aren't a benchmark", as an enthusiast acquaintance says. If you want to go fanless, you need to go to a silent PC community. Where their forums is actively hostile--even brutal--to people who do want a fan.
There are a lot of more or less weird, very dedicated, very opinionated subcultures in the PC hardware world.
The issue is kind of on the other side, though: you can pay more to improve your cooling in a way that might be quieter or better; but, if you absolutely do not want any fan noise--nor any fragile mechanical motors to move air/water/oil/ether/whatever--you get to a point where money can't buy better cooling... you simply have to put up with less cooling, with less powerful chips that have lower thermal bounds and often simply aren't fast. Like, I don't buy a computer because it is fast, and as soon as a company starts telling me how fast their computer is I start bemoaning the lost battery life and certainty of a noisy active cooling solution that I don't want :(.
I recall a video from Gamers Nexus at a trade event, though only that it was sometime roughly within the last year.
Entirely passive (I THINK / recall there was no pump), heat based circulation, with just TONS of radiator surface and an unwieldy design. However for that entirely custom solution they could theoretically scale up with additional size.
Still, if someone's going _that_ overboard, the heat's getting dumped somewhere.
'Industrial Chilled Water' as in a connection to an external (to the room, maybe even building) pump, and an external cooler (usually evaporative cooling, could be mega radiators in the shade too) like you see at industrial sites.
Totally fair, but I'd argue the water-cooled crowd is another, distinct sub-culture with it's own goals (e.g. silent is nice, but getting the highest overclock is nicer). Just like the nitrogen cooled and SLIC guys are scratching a slightly different itch. And, FWIW...there's probably 10 Noctuas within 20' of me; they are wonderfully quiet, but I think those calling them 'silent' are not quite accurate, YMMV.
You trade no incidental fan noise and better idle power for ass performance and "too bad this app you used for years doesn't work". I don't think that's even close to a good deal.
Do you have a "benchmark program" for performance and results for it? (e.g. I like to wall-clock measure a clean build of LLVM to approximate the performance on the compute-heavy workloads I run often.)
I hear you: would love to see a RISC-V-based system without all the downsides to using ARM. Perhaps in another 3-5 years we'll see performance parity and it'll be viable. If we get close it certainly seems like we'll see a laptop from Framework using such a chip.
Yeah I’m thinking it’s at least a few years off. But it’ll get better eventually. Framework is already on the RISCV train, so I have no doubt when a good RISCV SoC is available it’ll be in a framework ASAP. I’m hoping by the time my current 16 is feeling slow the RISCV option will be the obviously best choice
> ARM laptops are in the rise, and don’t need active cooling.
ARM has nothing to do with being fanless or not, that's just whether or not you're happy with what 15w can get you or not.
Not many people are, which is why ARM laptops with fans are just if not even more common than ones without.
Also there's a single ARM SoC that isn't garbage at this power/performance bracket on the open market, and it's embattled with legal troubles (Qualcomm vs. ARM over Snapdragon X Elite). And while the X Elite CPU is great, the GPU and software for things like video deciding are bad and break regularly
There's no ARM GPU on par with AMD's integrated GPU in the 300 series. The ARM CPU also among the top, trading blows with the M3 Max. Plus you can avoid the compatibility mess that is ARM on the desktop...
This is huge for me. I've wanted a framework for years and got really close to purchasing a 13" but I can't pull myself away from 2 in 1s (or really just any laptop with a touchscreen). The fact that it's going to be budget focused also excites me as a student, I hope that screen quality isn't too compromised.
I like the concept of being able to upgrade the mainboard, the problem I have is that the support needs to come with it. I've had a framework 13" intel 13th gen since September 2023 and it's "mostly" ok. There's a weird battery charging issue where it discharged while plugged in which I raised shortly after getting it and it's still there I've been told to wait for a response. That one I can live with. But for the past few months the CPU gets stuck at 400Mhz and I have to boot into the BIOS and disconnect the battery and power cable to get it to clear which isn't great when I'm in the middle of something important. Support have been prompt and polite but it's been like getting blood out of a stone getting somewhere, from previous experience with other manufacturers it would have been RMA'd by now. I'm not writing them off yet but I'm not filled with confidence.
On the plus side I'm hoping that it's the existence of framework that have convinced lenovo to stop soldering components in their new laptops, that's what put me off buying one and why I went with a framework.
That stuff is mostly fixed on the AMD stuff (I've owned every model of framework 13 and the framework 16 now), which makes me cautiously optimistic for the future. I think you still have to approach them as an ideals company working hard to become an actual company, which is why I don't buy their stuff for work anymore but buy it all day long for personal use. For work I can get a lenovo with similar specs and often a better OLED screen with a 3 year next day on site support contract for the price of the assembled frameworks usually. For home I prefer to self support and I greatly appreciate the speed at which their parts ship and the reasonable prices, plus with the DIY discount it's closer to price competitive. I think with the 16 I have now and I hope with the 13 refresh they just announced the problems stay away broadly and I can say they are an ideals company that is also an actual company but I need another year of use to feel comfortable with that statement.
Well now I've given up, they've told me I need to buy a new mainboard because it's "out of warranty" which is crap since I've been complaining about it since I bought it.
There is a balance between forgetting your purpose and thinking too narrowly about your business.
At first, Framework is "laptops that are repairable". But if you broaden what they are, they are a disruptor of direct-to-consumer computing equipment, with a core competency of repairability and upgradability.
An integrated CPU/RAM is a decrease in that measure, but it is for a valid benefit - a large improvement in performance for low-power graphics and AI software. They aren't sacrificing upgradability for aesthetic, and they continue to offer fully upgradable laptops.
I wonder if modular memory will continue to evolve and be competitive bandwidth wise with soldered.
> I wonder if modular memory will continue to evolve and be competitive bandwidth wise with soldered.
That's the promise of CAMM2, which is supposed to enable socketed LPDDR with almost the same performance as soldered-down LPDDR. It's still pretty bleeding-edge though so it's hard to blame Framework for sticking with soldered memory for now.
CAMM2 only has a 128-bit bus so it's going to severely compromise performance for workloads that want higher interconnect bandwidth, which Strix Halo is targeted at. For things like that, wider busses are always going to give much better performance/watt than upping clock speeds.
I'd be more than happy to see CAMM2 in general laptops, but it will probably always be much weaker at shared GPU/CPU designs like Strix Halo, Grace, Apple's M series, etc.
So don't make it then? If a particular vendor's product isn't in line with the company's mission, the CEO is the one to make the call to proceed with manufacturing.
edit: it's not for me and I can totally just not buy one, but if one identified with their original mission and sees this as betrayal of that, it'd be hard to justify getting a framework laptop when it's their turn to upgrade.
If you're not the audience, you're not the audience. Don't buy it. But a whole bunch of folks will be interested in this, and it lets framework dip their toes in the "not laptops" market without going bankrupt over it.
I think their ethos is more about being user- and developer- friendly.
RAM upgrades at reasonable prices, being able to buy the main board sans case, and supporting multiple OSes all point in that direction, without strictly being modular
The bit you quoted back to me says, "the RAM is non-upgradable", which is what I said. Your interpretation (that the parent commenter misspoke) is more generous, though, so let's go with that.
> Framework’s mission is to fix consumer electronics - and we are doing that by respecting you and the planet. We have put this vision into everything we do by providing you with amazing products that are meant to last as long as possible by letting you upgrade and modify them over that lifetime to support your specific needs.
> Our mission is to reduce the amount of waste that is generated and energy that is expended and reduce our overall consumer electronics footprint, while providing a better product than you can get anywhere else. This includes using post-consumer-recycled aluminum and plastic in our products as well as recycled and recyclable packaging.
> We have just started this journey, and we are continually looking for ways to reduce our footprint and be even healthier for the environment. We’re happy to get ideas and suggestions on how we can do this. The Framework Community is a great place to share this.
> You presume to have internalized Framework's core-values more than the founder/CEO?
His reaction in the livestream was along these lines when he semi-jokingly said "I'm surprised no one from the audience threw something at me"
At a larger event I would have kind of expected a "boo", but it seemed like a rather small gathering where most people knew each other. Unlike the live 12k Youtube chat, that was very surprised and disappointed at times.
You can't argue with laws of physics at some point. Every nanometer counts at those frequencies. You can't put your RAM too far at some point in which a physical socket will be a deal breaker.
Also, Framework doesn't need to make something for you to "build a PC". PCs are extremely modular already. They are solving a different problem here.
I presume that my core values, which I might know just a teeny tiny bit, align with what the corporation has stated as their values. But at the end of the day, the"core values" of a corporation are just some words on a webpage on the journey to more profit and I mean, hey, I like money too, so it's not like I can really fault them for pivoting.
This is literally the same product they've been selling with just one more component soldered on (memory). I think it's a bit of a stretch to call it a "pivot".
The question is how much different is a motherboard with soldered CPU vs. CPU and memory soldered. You seem to be of the opinion that it's a completely different product category, I'm of the opinion they're more the same than different. I don't remember the last time I didn't upgrade all three components at once.
The point is it's a pretty critical component, so "just one" is doing a lot to downplay how critical a component it is. If we get rid of that one component, you're nowhere. So calling it "just one component" belies how critical a component it is.
> I don't remember the last time I didn't upgrade all three components at once.
Thank you for explaining your perspective. If they're a single component in your mind, and not modular, then no wonder we have such a disconnect.
I would posit that they're a single component for most consumers and buyers, and that a small majority will upgrade any single one of these three components in the lifespan of their computer. A quick check of r/buildapc reinforces this to be the case, as most posts are either full-system builds or peripheral upgrades (GPU, SSD).
My guess is that Framework had a unique opportunity with the AMD Ryzen AI and decided to capitalize on it to serve a fast-and-growing home market for this class of hardware, and the soldered LPDDR was a compromise considering the requirements of the CPU. If I had to choose between them offering this product with that restriction, or "sticking to their core values" and waiting for an alternative solution then I'm going to learn to live with the restriction. If the traffic queue wasn't just marketing BS, I assume many other people are also willing to live with it.
I want Framework to be a long-term successful company and that means making good use of their cash, and this gives them a safer opportunity to test a new product category. Maybe the result of this decision is an expansion of the category to include more modular options, at which point everyone wins.
For most consumers, existing manufacturers cover their use case. There's already a number of existing standards for modular desktop computers chassis. Framework is especially interesting to that small section of the market that isn't most consumers. Framework could pivot and sell vacuum thermos cups for all it really matters as a corporation that exists to make money for its investors. If they sell out, and modular laptops and reducing ewaste is no longer their goal, and it was all just a cash grab, that's fine too. I don't work there, it doesn't really make any difference to me, they can do whatever they want, but at the same time I feel let down.
Modularity is not a binary choice - it's a spectrum with tradeoffs.
One might maliciously (IMO) argue that the single motherboard in Framework products that you presumably find perfectly fine, could have been designed as several interconnected ones, that are individually replaceable. On the surface, it can seem like an unimpeachable criticism, but once you consider the cost in complexity, performance and BOM, then the "less modular" single-motherboard option becomes much more reasonable.
Framework went with soldered memory because that was the only way they could hir the memory bandwidth performance numbers they wanted for this product in the context of the segment it occupies. If you value the ability to replace/upgrade RAM over 256Gb/s, then this is not the product for you. If you think Framework shouldn't compete in this segment due to a confluence of ideological reasons and the technical limitations of slotted RAM, then the CEO disagrees with you, as do the future buyers of the compact desktop
I disagree. Modularity is good, but if there are real technical reasons why it is not possible (like in thise case), then it could be a worthwile compromise.
that's a fair point! soldered on ram currently has more performance than socketed. it's definitely a compromise and I'm being an uncompromising motherfucker. It's not my company though and I'm just some rando on the Internet expressing an opinion.
FWIW I find the small form factor combined with the CPU and high-powered integrated GPU very appealing. I don't think I could build something with this form factor using off the shelf parts (someone correct me if I'm wrong)... it would end up needing a larger dedicated GPU.
I suspect their competition isn't actually people who build their own PCs, but people in the market for Mac Pros — they have a number of benefits over Apple here.
I'm thinking of buying one as well, and I never would've purchased any of their other products. But I have to agree with people who say this goes against Framework's mission.
I think there's like electromagnetic interference if signals across various buses in computers are too close together, making it more likely that the signals get corrupted or noisy, which could increase latency for trying to clean the signal or make it impossible to get any data of value.
Not an engineer though so please correct me. I only have a vague understanding of this.
> which could increase latency for trying to clean the signal
There's none of that here. That's a concept for uncontrolled interfaces. This is a memory interface, where you either have a good signal or a flawed design. Things like ECC do exist, but those are to detect bit corruption in the memory, but a flawless communication between is still required.
At some point (if you go to high enough frequencies), the capacitance of the copper traces will become high enough (i.e. without any capacitor component connecting to a trace between a CPU and a RAM module) to prevent further frequency increases. One way to deal with that is to have shorter traces. This is exactly what CAMM memory modules do - they have shorter (total) traces than DIMM. Even shorter traces are possible if you get rid of modules completely (i.e. solder the RAM chips to the motherboard). Better yet is to place RAM and CPU cores on one chip, skipping even the motherboard traces between the CPU and RAM chips.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this is an AMD SoC, so a combo of a CPU+GPU (and TPU/AI engine, whatever you wanna call it) on the same chip. And they do share the RAM.
They're using an AMD APU: it has unified RAM and VRAM, much like Apple Silicon. Hence why it needs socketed RAM.
Unified RAM/VRAM is very nice for running LLMs locally, since you can get wayyyy more RAM than you typically can get VRAM on discrete GPUs. 128GB VRAM on discrete GPUs is 4x5090s — aka $8k just on GPU spend alone. This is $2k and it includes the CPU!
Of course, it'll be somewhat slower than a discrete GPU setup, but at a quarter of the cost, that's a reasonable tradeoff for most people I'd think. It should run Llama 3.1 70b (or various finetunes/LoRAs) quite easily, even with reasonably long context.
I put in a pre-order - they sold out the first batch pretty quickly today so I won't be getting it till Q3. The price seems quite decent. Framework has a good reputation. I've been watching for the HP Strix Halo miniPC since they announced early in the year, but it still says "coming soon" and no pricing. I suspect the Framework price will come in lower than the HP. Also, Framework is a lot more transparent than HP.
RISC-V chips tend to be slower, but architecture-wise there's not much an ARM chip can do that a RISC-V one can't. Both are pretty well-supported for the coding/web browsing use case laptops get employed for.
Isn't the Snapdragon X Elite pretty much the only part that would fit the bill? Framework might not even be able to get those, Qualcomm generally won't even give you the time of day unless you commit to buying a bazillion units.
Yes but Framework doesn't have to and probably doesn't want to. Snapdragon laptops often ship with very few user serviceable parts including RAM which would be tough for the Framework mold IMO even if they got something working with LPCAMM (though that's likely an inevitability). But Qualcomm making a Framework compatible board in part as development kits would likely be beneficial for both.
Soldered memory and no x16 PCIe slot on a desktop are interesting choices. Not sure who the target market is. Seems like the interconnect between boards is also pretty slow compared to Nvidia Digits or even thunderbolt 5.
It's got a rtx 4070 laptop chip equivalent on chip, so most are not going to need more GPU or anything else that needs a x16 PCIe. Looks pretty nice for a small PC that's quiet, energy efficient, and don't flinch if you try to run something 3D intensive.
would have been cool to know about this a month ago
i just built a mini ITX gaming PC for a friend, and this one looks pretty good for quality/$. good enough that i wouldn't be surprised if these get snapped up and re-sold for more than the sticker price
i think it makes more sense to think of it as a high-end console, given that basically everything is soldered, though
This is a terrible gaming PC. It’s really meant for running LLMs, the main benefit is the large amount of unified graphics memory, which is not relevant to gaming.
For one thing, the price per FPS for gaming is going to be terrible. This price can get you a serious rig with much better performance.
Gaming is a very specific workload that almost entirely depends on the GPU. It is hard to even purchase a CPU that performs poorly in gaming by accident, or unless you are a hyper-specific type of gamer (like someone who plays e-sports titles and expects 300FPS for optimal reaction time, or someone who plays extremely CPU-intense games like Stellaris).
You don’t want a gaming PC with soldered GPU, even if you are using it as a “console,” even if you prioritize small size. You really want the ability to replace graphics cards because none of the other components important to gaming age out very quickly.
Here are all of the parts in my system that are older than my current graphics card (2024):
- Motherboard
- CPU
- RAM
- Power Supply
- SSD
- Case
- CPU cooler
Here is a list of those parts that are older than my previous graphics card (2020)
- RAM
- Case
- Power Supply
- Motherboard
- SSD
Here is a list of all the components that are older than the prior graphics cards before that! (Year unknown)
- Motherboard
- RAM
- Power Supply
Arguably I didn’t even need to upgrade the CPU, the cooler upgrade was necessitated by the CPU upgrade, and the case upgrade and SSD were both just personal wants and not needs.
Basically everything that matters besides my graphics card has stayed very constant but upgrading the GPU has increased my gaming performance by over 100% in the period I have described.
a quick search told me that this thing's GPU (8060s) is comparable to a 4070
from what i can tell, a 4070 alone is ~$750. this thing is apparently $799 for the CPU+GPU+RAM+motherboard all soldered together ($300 more for case+PSU+SSD)
if the CPU+RAM+motherboard are costing me $50, i don't really care if i have to throw them out along with the GPU
i think the thing that got me was that people wrote articles comparing this thing to a laptop GPU, and i didn't read far enough to notice. normally, people compare desktop stuff to desktop stuff, and laptop stuff to laptop stuff
i haven't bought a laptop gpu since ~2008. from what i remember, they used to at least put "mobility" in the name, or throw and 'm' after the number, or something
It's always interesting watching different segments people react to a product announcement. When Intel announced their new GPUs, AI people talked about how lame it is and they should've put my VRAM while gaming people talked about what a steal it is.
Same, would love that. TinyGrad’s driver would be pretty awful to use if it would even work since I think it would prevent using the GPU simultaneously, though I may be wrong there.
Otherwise as it stands the 128 GB configuration seems pretty niche.
EDIT: looking deeper it seems like the "Ryzen AI" is it's own thing with a different implementation than ROCm, so it could be interesting but might not help with ROCm.
One interesting angle here could be if this had good compatibility with SteamOS to the point where it supported most/all the games the Steam Deck does. That would make it a very appealing offering, since right now DIY SteamOS setups are a pretty wild west.
As is you can buy a decent AMD mini PC for about $500 and just install Linux on it. It works very well for the most part, and a few distros offer steam OS like experiences.
For my mini PC I couldn't get the EGPU to work with Linux so I'm stuck on Windows for now... But I play a few games that are Windows only ( anti cheat) so this is for the best.
Ideally what you'd be paying for is Valve's first-party partnership, and therefore a commitment to tailor Proton development to specifically ensure that this hardware keeps working (at least as well as a Steam Deck works, anyway). I believe this is what Valve has done for the Lenovo Legion Go S.
That is ideal, but also pretty unnecessary. The only thing AMD has to support on their end is Vulkan, and the work on that front is effectively finished. What Valve can offer is HID support for handheld hardware and potentially shader caching servers for huge swaths of identical hardware models.
With a desktop there's a limit to what Valve can commit to. There's not a single controller firmware to support, and probably not even a consistent GPU setup to cache for. The extent of realistic support for these AMD boards is kinda fully realized at this point. Proton is, and will remain, a plug-and-play experience for AMD users that own supported hardware.
The "support" is complete. Proton has only a few critical dependencies and they are officially supported by AMD's GPU drivers already. I cannot name a single part of their hardware stack that would not get supported on-parity with the Steam Deck.
Valve as a company could shut down tomorrow, and AMD users could still use Proton to play Windows games as long as their GPU is Vulkan 1.2 compliant.
Why this over a traditional ATX work station? The article even points out the motherboard will fit in an ATX case, so size doesn't seem to be the major selling point.
For gaming specifically, so many micro ATX motherboards offer Gen 5 PCIe, which can handle a proper video card, double the RAM, and the smaller cases are only slightly larger than this Framework.
The main selling point is the unified memory, the GPU isn't as fast as a discrete GPU but it can address quadruple the RAM of the biggest consumer dGPU. It'll be good for inference if the software stack works.
It's billed as "Massive gaming capability, heavy-duty AI compute, and standard PC parts, all in 4.5L." on the Framework website. And then further below it has "All the power to play all the games." And it has a dedicated "Gaming" tab with benchmarks and stuff.
I could see myself going for something like this for gaming actually.
My gaming needs are pretty tame to the point that my current 3080Ti has been and remains overkill (usually 2+ year old titles @ 2560x1440), and as time has gone on I’ve come to value silence (which the FW Desktop seems good at, overcooling a laptop APU with a single fan desktop cooler) over raw power. In addition, the discrete GPU story continues to escalate to all-new levels of eye-wateringly expensive stupidity which makes me not want to buy any discrete GPU until Nvidia and AMD bring their prices back down to earth and that whole mess with the new Nvidia power connector is properly resolved, and that’s to say nothing about the unstoppable creep of GPU size, heat, and power consumption.
If I could sell my full size gaming tower and replace it with an effortlessly inaudible yet reasonably powerful air cooled SFF box, I might just do it. In all truth I could probably get by fine with this first gen Framework desktop, but it would make more sense to wait for a second or third gen where the APU's graphical power comes into the range of upper-tier RTX 3000 cards so I don’t need to use framegen as a crutch for decent framerates.
I agree with the point about noise. I’ve been looking for a powerful, compact and silent gaming pc for a while ( with silent then compact being more important than powerful ). I don’t need a laptop - a Mac mini-like or slightly bigger box is good enough .
When I look around, gaming pcs are mostly about big and visible, sometimes reasonably silent, almost never compact, inconspicuous and silent.
To me there is a market for this kind of product, and it hasn’t been addressed properly yet.
Since I have so far failed in my quest, I now use GeForce Now from my Mac mini which is a good approximation of what I want.
> (And critically, the capability of building one themselves.)
Kind of but not really. Any SFF build that’s anywhere close to similar in size and capabilities to the Framework is probably going to be making considerably more noise, even with an AIO liquid cooler.
Just a note that the GPU in this, while quite good, is still basically a midrange laptop GPU. It seems to be a tad bit better than an RTX 2060 but worse than any Nvidia card sold at a higher tier than that. You're right that's probably fine for most folks though. For folks building a gaming PC though, a RTX 4060 will probably be pretty great.
This is exactly where I'm at now. I honestly don't care about PC upgradability anymore. I buy a new cpu, motherboard, memory and gpu all at once, and I'd be more then happy to just buy it all as one integrated unit. And fan noise is also a BIG deal for me.
Between consoles and macs/macbooks, the writing is on the wall and cpu+cpu+unified memory is the future for performance. I will absolutely be looking at buying one of framework desktops instead of building a new PC soon.
Small, quiet, and more energy efficient is a good start.
I also saw that while it competed well with a 4070 at average frame rates, that the 1% lows were twice as fast. The speculation I saw was that the 12GB vram limit was causing issues on the Nvidia side.
Having twice the bandwidth, dynamically allocated VRAM, and very decent cores seems like a solid workhouse that it's more about better worst case performance (when you are heavily cache missing or running out of vram).
Sure some will buy a top of the line CPU from Intel or AMD, buy a larger case, and buy a RTX 5080 or 5090, for the 98% of the rest this strix halo will be plenty and will use less power, create less noise, and generate less heat.
This isn't really in the same category as the 4090/5090, it has a lot more memory but with a fraction of the bandwidth. 128GB at 256GB/sec vs 32GB at nearly 2TB/sec.
Nvidia's actual counterpart would be their DIGITS mini-PC, which has a similar big-and-slow memory architecture.
AMD claims this APU delivers more than twice the tokens per second than an RTX4090.
So its better than 4090.
The reason its better with a less powerful GPU is context switching.
"AMD also claims its Strix Halo APUs can deliver 2.2x more tokens per second than the RTX 4090 when running the Llama 70B LLM (Large Language Model) at 1/6th the TDP (75W)."
This is a cool product for people who want a lot of RAM for LLMs. Those like me who build their own systems would get better value out of a machine they've built.
The only parts which can be customized for this product are the presence or absence of a handle, the cooler's fan, the case's side and some front tiles. That's it. The m.2 SSD and the wifi are the only components which can be replaced.
This isn't the kind of product I wanted Framework to make. I was hoping they'd make hardware which can be repaired and which has components available for it. The motherboard has all the chips and everything else soldered on it. The most expensive part of the computer needs to be replaced if a voltage regulator or some other part found on the motherboard fails. There's no cheap $ 100-200 motherboard to replace in this product. It's the same problem as with Apple's Macs.
Can someone at Framework answer this question: what do the customers do with your Framework Desktop hardware once it breaks and you no longer support it? It's e-waste. What happens when the motherboard in my computer dies? I buy only a replacement motherboard while keeping the RAM, the CPU and GPU, unlike for Framework Desktop. What happens when the GPU I have is no longer useful or supported? I buy only a new GPU.
This board doesn't even have PCI-E for a GPU. This product is only good as long as the iGPU provides the required performance for whatever application is of interest. This is a weakness the Framework 13 motherboard shares. There's no way to remove the board from its case to use it with a PCI-E x16 GPU with the right PSU.
AMD is known to abandon their customers once they release newer dGPUs and SoCs with iGPUs. This can be easily observed if you review the countless reports for crashes with amdgpu on Linux. The amdgpu driver has various bugs which lead to crashes of the GPU or of the entire machine. They're also not good at shipping CPU microcode for consumer CPUs to address hardware bugs and CVEs.
As a side note, even the Framework AI HX laptops are extremely expensive for what they offer in terms of hardware. A laptop which goes above $ 2000 without RAM, an SSD, a charger and without any adapters for those bays seems to be a good deal? That's absurd. There are laptops with 32 GB of RAM, the same CPU, better displays, a 1 TB SSD, a charger and all the required ports present on the laptop for less than $ 2000 (including taxes).
I hope someone from Framework reads this. I want repairable products which can be upgraded without replacing a monolithic part which is the entire computer.
Other noteworthy things
- their site went down hard with a queue to see the site... downright absurd
- they haven't posted the specs of the Framework 12
- there are still no actual repair centers which repair their products, no physical stores or sellers which sell Framework products outside of their site
- there have been reports of people who didn't have their hardware problems with Framework laptops addressed, even LTT addressed such issues
I'm still outright begging Framework to get better at supporting the products that it's already shipping (and to also just... _actually ship them_ to more places). Get more third parties manufacturing compatible components and expansions that are compatible across those products in order to fulfill the stated goal of solving the industry's extensible and modular hardware deserts that exist outside of the lowest-end SBC and higher-end desktop PC markets. Get there before Dell starts doing it, because they've started sniffing around this market segment, and if Framework's not able to scale up if/when Dell enters then it's gonna be over fast.
Most of the manufactured Framework-compatible accessories are skins, wraps, and expansion card organizers. Cooler Master dropped one mainboard case and seemingly bounced from the laptop project altogether. There are a bunch of cool DIY projects, a handful of which have been productized, all of them niche.
The community marketplace concept never materialized. The extensibility promise of the 16's input modules haven't materialized. The only third-party 13 mainboard that exists after 3.5 years is a cool but ultimately impractical RISC dev board/proof-of-concept; the idea that the Framework mainboard would become a laptop equivalent to the ITX/ATX standards in desktops just did not happen, and Framework's decision to start shipping a bunch of different mainboard formats means it never will.
It's particularly depressing to me that the only modular component that seems to be compatible across the 12, 13, 16, and Desktop seems to be the expansion cards, which are a fun concept but at the end of the day are just a form factor for USB-C port adapters.
I'm honestly excited about the 12 being a supposedly cheaper repairable option, although seeing this weird Desktop ready to go before the 12 is a boggling decision. I have no interest in spending $1k-$2k+ for a novel mini-PC using laptop components, in a mostly plastic case, with a bespoke motherboard crammed with soldered-on bespoke parts (even for good reasons!) that are designed to _not_ be repaired or replaced.
(By the way, why _doesn't_ the desktop use the Framework mainboard form factor? I'd be interested in a genuinely larger mainboard-compatible desktop case with more airflow, designed for a specialty Desktop mainboard but compatible with the laptop mainboards too.
A mini-ITX board that's less modular than a commodity mini-ITX board, in a mini-ITX case that isn't competitive with commodity mini-ITX cases, is such a weird choice in Framework's "keep using your mainboards" pitch. If they're going to ship a bespoke board with little to no added value when installed outside of their own case, why doesn't that board use _their own board format_?)
Hell, Cooler Master's MasterFrame line is a better execution of what I'd expect and want out of Framework shipping an *TX-compatible desktop case than Framework's case looks to be, and Cooler Master apparently worked on Framework's case too!)
And even then, the 12 is just another set of components that aren't cross-compatible with the 13. If they were selling a convertible 13 case, or even just a stylus/touchscreen display for the 13, I'd be buying it right now.
Even the 13's new AMD boards aren't exciting because I expect them to ship with the same or worse firmware and driver stability or compatibility issues that still haven't been solved on the 7040-series 13 mainboards a year after shipping them, not because Framework is a terrible company but because their support from AMD has apparently been a nightmare. I finally have my 13 stable and expect a new generation of AMD mainboard to just chuck it back into firmware hell.
That Framework keeps taking VC money just to design and ship new laptop lines when their existing lines aren't stable, _and_ ship a less-modular, less-repairable novelty in the Desktop that t...
> seeing this weird Desktop ready to go before the 12 is a boggling decision
There is substantial x86 market demand for local inference that can compete with Apple. AMD/Framework 128GB for $2K will be competitive.
> A mini-ITX board that's less modular than a commodity mini-ITX board
LLMs need LPDIMM for high-bandwidth memory and efficient power. mITX board allows interop with a galaxy of existing mITX cases, including NAS.
> same or worse firmware and driver stability or compatibility issues that still haven't been solved on the 7040-series 13 mainboards a year after shipping them, not because Framework is a terrible company but because their support from AMD has apparently been a nightmare.
We're inching towards AMD's 2026 target for open-source firmware, which will hopefully help all AMD OEMs.
Is integrated/non-upgradeable RAM the unavoidable future for all consumer-grade devices? Is there any sort of standard on the horizon that would enable the massive memory bandwidth to compete against the M1-style approach?
You've never been able to upgrade RAM on GPUs for the exact same reasons that Framework is alluding to. That's what's happening here; GPUs have lots of cores, and to keep them feed you need lots of bandwidth to go along with it. All dedicated GPUs come with dedicated memory for this exact reason. Things like traditional "iGPUs" that use DDR can get away with it exactly because they are so small and computationally weak that the limited bandwidth isn't the immediate #1 bottleneck. But Strix Halo is not intended to be a measly iGPU system, so it has different needs.
There just isn't a free lunch here, it's an inherent design tradeoff for these kinds of chips. The CPU is just along for the ride, in this case.
Well, you haven't ever been able to upgrade RAM on your GPUs, so the real question is more like: will more consumer-grade devices move towards unified memory designs with single memory pool?
My completely-bullshit opinion is something like "I think it's attractive for a lot of mid-range or lower end SKUs, so you'll see it more frequently." It's attractive because you save a lot of power and components with this kind of design. It would be interesting to see this kind of design (APU) in a socket-able factor too, but who knows. It's also attractive for a certain class of high-end design too (like Grace Hopper), but I think you're going to see RAM sticks for a while yet in the mid-to-very-high-range.
This is completely bullshit because it is based more on vibes and basic technical design points than any kind of market forecasting or anything like that.
553 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 314 ms ] threadFor every other use-case? Yeah, just get a desktop.
The nvidia digits uses DGOS, same as their grace+hopper and similar enterprise/cloud products.
That was basically unobtainium and I've compromised down to a AliExpress mini-ITX motherboard with a mobile AMD CPU, a AM5 heatsink and firmware that is... flavorful, powered by a screaming TFX power supply crammed in an absurdly tight 3.8L noname case running on Proxmox (when you start reconfiguring PCI Express bridges through the serial port kernel debugger because that's just about the only device the Illumos kernel enumerated at all on what is supposed to be your main server, it's time to give up on SmartOS).
It works, but it's a little box of pure hatred and heresy that's quite far off from what I've wanted initially. It is actually an improvement over my previous main server, somehow.
I’d have bought a Beelink or similar mini PC if I wanted small size and low power along with low price. You lose some modularity compared to ITX boards but I am almost certain you spent more money and deal with more noise and maybe even more power consumption.
For me personally my homelab PC is just an ATX mid tower in the closet because those parts are dirt cheap and you can get lots of performance with essentially infinite modularity.
That makes noise (a glass panel separates the rack from the entrance), power (can't risk overheating in an enclosed closet) and space (6U and 25cm of usable depth is an exceedingly small volume for a homelab) all important factors at the same time. I also wanted at least 2.5 Gib Ethernet, as much DDR5 RAM and CPU cores as I could chuck into it and two NVMe slots. I rejected a mini PC due to noise concerns and I wanted standardized parts and modularity.
I have a AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS, 64 GiB of RAM and terabytes of NVMe in less than 4 liters of volume without sacrificing modularity. I've mounted an AMD Wraith Stealth, which is a comically oversized CPU cooling fan for a 35W TDP thermal load. It's fast, small, silent, overkill and still fits standard parts.
I do want to get rid of the ridiculously noisy TFX power supply at some point, most likely for a 48v DC ATX power supply. Unfortunately, since I like stupid ideas I want a fully 48v DC powered rack and Power-over-Ethernet throughout my apartment to get rid of as many power supplies and fans as I can. I've started accumulating parts for it (like a 48v 2.5 Gib 10 port PoE switch, PoE powered gigabit switches and PoE-to-12VDC adapters), but I'm still not sure how I'll pull it off in the end since I'm way off the beaten path.
At this point you're probably wondering why I do things that way. I'm not sure myself, but seeing what I tend to do for fun it's probably best not to ask, lest the universe stops its suspension of disbelief while I'm in the middle of performing yet another heretical act on some poor unsuspecting piece of hardware or software.
Those specs all seem totally attainable in a mini PC, although something with an equivalent chip and dual nvme slots is up in the $800-1000 range.
Maybe it would be louder? I don’t think they have a reputation for being loud though? I certainly can’t hear the one I’m using as a router, but it has a lower load profile than my main server.
I have a small apartment too but I might be lucky with my deep half height closet where I can shove equipment back there.
A former sysadmin job gave me a deep disdain for 40mm fans and modern 1U/2U off-the-shelf AC powered servers. It's a technological dead-end that is a legacy of old datacenter architectures that no longer make sense to continue. A holistic blade-based DC powered datacenter eliminates much of the inefficiencies inherent to that legacy AC design.
Now, I'm not aiming to do a high-density homelab and regardless how cool they are, an Oxide Computer rack is about three orders of magnitude out of reach across several metrics. That being said, I think a DC powered homelab can enjoy a lot of the benefits.
For example, I have one 10 Gib switch, three gigabit switches (one per room), a Synology NAS and a Android TV player. With AC that's six power supplies, each taking a dedicated outlet for less than 60W combined. With PoE I can power all of that directly from my 10 Gib switch. That's five less power supplies and also gets rid of the power strips.
Or take a 250W ATX power supply. On AC it requires transformers, full bridge rectifiers, big bulky capacitors, DC-to-DC converters and most likely a fan. On DC it requires just the DC-to-DC converters, with modern power electronics that's doable at a fraction of the volume and without the fan because the actual power supply is upstream and potentially shared across multiple equipments.
I might have an affinity for doing stupid and insane projects, but it does come from a thoughtful position. If I ever pull it off, hopefully it can show that we don't have to endure outdated and legacy designs forever even within the comfort of our homes. Alas, I'm busy doing other cursed things at the moment so I just put that angry little server in a spare room for now.
For $2000, you get 128 of system RAM, 96 of which is addressable as VRAM. Only ways of getting 96GB of VRAM in a desktop are to either:
1. Drop ~$5000 on a (very non-upgradeable) Mac Studio 2. Drop ~$20k on a dual RTX 6000 workstation
For running local LLMs, there's nothing on the market presently even remotely like this.
I have a max with 64GB RAM, which is good enough for 70b models with a 3 bit quant. Even if I had more RAM to run larger models, my GPU would be the bottleneck.
To get an M4 Max so you can have 128GB, you need a macbook pro. The cheapest macbook pro with 128GB is $4700.
M4 Max does have the benefit of more memory controllers, so it has twice as much memory bandwidth as Ryzen AI Max. But that's a lot of money to pay for it.
By the time the Framework ships the Mac Studio will have been updated to the M4 Max. Although 128GB will still probably be around $3k.
This announcement is bog standard mini-ITX.
> (note the two bays for Framework's expansion cards at the bottom)
> Your estimated wait time is 1 hour and 3 minutes.
Ouch
It would obviously be better if they could limit it to something like `store.frame.work`, rather than putting a queue in front of their entire site…
https://i.imgur.com/twcxJjr.png
Whoever is in charge of that website gets an L.
For that matter, it makes me reconsider my hosting of things with Cloudflare. I know nothing about framework's site's configuration, but I know I don't want my site to have a waiting line like that.
edit: also, the timer went down and then went back up, so I have thoughts about this enterprise Cloudflare feature.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/waiting-room/
guess it's true what they say about hardware vs software. you gotta pick one to be good at, and the other is going to suffer for it, to varying degrees. (inb4 someone mentions Apple. Apple is a hardware company. Their software's alright but it's full of bugs and they're simply not as good as it as they are with hardware.)
E-commerce is hard. I worked at a company where we could use 1% of infra at its peak every day of the year except 15-20 days. We knew exactly when floodgates will open, and we still would suffer extra high latency or even downtime.
e-commerce is hard. that's why we get paid so well. hiring the smartest teenager that your nephew knows to setup some bullshit for $15/hr vs hiring a senior SRE at $100+/hr, when it directly leads to lost sales is a choice.
the senior part also comes after having failed to scale in production, and learning the lessons there, leading to a site that stays up on the next black Friday/cyber Monday, and stands up to various ddos attacks. (this was before Cloudflare, mind you)
I bet the waiting room makes it worse, since it cannot cache the page due to having the waiting room.
also the page has `via2.0 heroku-router' header.
https://i.ibb.co/Y4n5Qhzm/framework.webp ("Framework Desktop is a big computer made mini")
The soldered ram is particularly unacceptable. I get and believe that they could not make it work otherwise, but then they should have stopped the product instead of just adding to the e-waste.
You can get similar bandwidth with server boards that cost 5-10x as much, or with a Mac Studio that costs 2.5x as much.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module)
The problem is that these are integrated shared-memory systems with a single RAM pool. That's nice for a lot of reasons, but GPUs need many more memory channels and larger bus widths than CPUs do in order to do work and remain fed at a reasonable power draw. It's an inherent design trade off. I don't see a CAMM style solution for GPU memory coming anytime soon except on the low end.
Could be wrong, but I don't think you can. The bandwidth limit, AFAIK, is a problem with the DDR5 spec. These soldered solutions can go faster specifically because they aren't DDR5.
The latest AMD server is 12 DIMMS wide, but has 24 channels of DDR5.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amds-beastly...
(video also features Framework's founder/CEO)
See also:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_address_remapping_tab...
[2] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.19/gpu/amdgpu.html#:~:tex...
(The 32GB config is silly, though. With that little RAM, there is nothing it does better than a cheaper machine with a discrete GPU.)
In the LTT video the framework CEO explains that AMD wasn't able to make LPCAMM work because of signal integrity over the bus reasons.
But 2000 dollars for up to 110GB of VRAM in Linux makes this a VERY interesting little machine, so much that the framework website has a cloudflare queue right now...
Better to think of it as a competitor to Mac Studio & Nvidia Digits, which are much less repairable by comparison. The soldered memory is an unfortunate reality of these "unified" memory systems.
The only way to get a traditional desktop with 96GB of VRAM is to spend upwards of $10K loading it up with 2-4 GPUs.
1) have ram soldered but provide also extra 1 slot for LPCAMM/LPDIMM ram. Soldered RAM would be used for GPU but external slower ram still could be used for non GPU related stuff (software) that doesn't require high bandwidth/latency.
2) I think motherboard will have 4 pads for ram and if you buy less 1-3 pads will be just having pins without chip. If they would sell memory chips and provide some tooling/documentations for specialised/certified shop they could solder those. You could still upgrade just not by yourself.
Theoretically awesome, but this might have some interesting market consequences for everyone else.
You could run R1 671B using unsloth’s quantized version that fits in <80GB. Not sure why that would be a benchmark though, there’s nothing that can run the model at full precision right now except for (very slow) server hardware.
Not if you are using the CPU. I am under the impression most inference use cases are memory bandwidth limited, not compute limited, so running on the GPU would gain you little to nothing unless the GPU has faster access to the shared memory.
256GB/sec, so roughly M4 Pro throughput.
Or a dual socket AMD Turin.
Or a grace+hopper (assuming you offload to the hopper).
Latency is dictated by the laws of physics, more bandwidth is easy, but not cheap.
New 12-inch laptop form factor with 360 degree hinge (ie "tablet mode") and a touchscreen. No price announced, but it is aimed at students: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/frameworks-laptop-12...
New mainboard upgrade options for Framework 13 models: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/framework-gives-its-...
I was planning on ordering the 7840U version to where I'm staying in a trip to the US, but now it feels a bit of a let down to order a last-gen model since the new one might not arrive in time for my trip in mid-April.
Nowadays i don’t do much heavy computing on my personal laptop and i have an external 34” display anyway.
So yeah, a 12” would be very interesting.
Also i have fond memories of coding everyday on my 10” netbook when i was 16 :P
The 12" form factor tho..
I also have a 13.5" 3000x2000 laptop and it uses 200% scaling, fractional is blurry. Initially I was trying to use Ubuntu but the extend monitor scaling was so bad (Chromium, VS Code), just decided to stick with Windows for this device.
Even Surfaces have been using 1440p at 12'' since 2016, and 2880 x 1920 since 2018! Why would Android & Apple tablets at much smaller screen size have higher DPIs, if 1080p was perfect? Do you expect to put Android tablets closer to your face than x86 tablets for some reason?
Sigh... since when has DPI started _decreasing_ again? I refuse to accept this trend, in the same way it was stupid back in the 2000s when LCDs became a thing.
The human hardware isn't getting any better, so we must accept that there exists some upper bound beyond which improving resolution isn't a selling point for most people, especially given the necessary tradeoffs in battery life, processing power, memory usage, and input latency it entails. Now consider that this ceiling may have been hit 20 years ago, and that the continued dominance of 1920x1080 may not be because manufacturers are lazy, but because most people are happy enough with it.
The Steam Hardware Survey shows that 1920x1080 is still the majority resolution, and that's among an audience that's inordinately populated by technological enthusiasts. The fact that people are seemingly dead-set on sticking to 1920x1080 despite--as you point out--the availability of alternatives only further strengthens the argument that the majority of consumers just don't particularly value higher resolutions.
If you want to play the useless popularity game, go and check what are the resolutions on the phones and tablets with even smaller screens sold in the last 10 years (which exceeds the number of laptops by far), and even friggin' eink notepads.
"The fact" is people today would never accept sub-retina dpis even for cheap phones, and the market has clearly spoken. "The fact" is your arguments about human perception are utter bullshit (as trivially disproven as todays arguments about 60fps), and remind me of the discussions I had when forced to use 60fps 800x600 TN screens (pure hell on earth) after having used 1280 at 90hz for ages with CRTs, all in the name of "progress".
The hardware survey doesn't occur while games are running. It's recording the display setting of your desktop, which would put you and everyone like you in the 4K bucket.
> If you want to play the useless popularity game, go and check what are the resolutions on the phones and tablets with even smaller screens sold in the last 10 years
I have a rather new high-end phone. Its native resolution is 2400x1080, and that 2400 is only there because phones have a particularly long aspect ratio compared to other devices.
> "The fact" is people today would never accept sub-retina dpis even for cheap phones, and the market has clearly spoken.
1920x1080 is a wildly popular resolution. You appear to be frustrated that the market hasn't spoken in your favor.
> "The fact" is your arguments about human perception are utter bullshit
You appear to be hallucinating arguments that I haven't made.
Since the pandemic. I have a still functioning Galaxy S8 in my drawer, which shames modern phones with its 570ppi density.
If you put the phone in battery saver mode, lowering resolution is one of the things it does.
And, to give an idea of what are we talking about, even in such power saving modes these much smaller and older phones still have more pixels than a 1080p screen.
Even if you use today's prices, the cheapest iPad has almost double the resolution. No, 1080p at 12'' it is not plenty dense. You do not put this smaller thing as far from your face as a 24'' monitor.
Hopefully that's upgradeable someday in any case.
Fractional scaling isn’t great. Windows handles it the best by a large margin (it’s really quite respectable; honestly I’d just call it “not ideal” rather than “not great” if restricting to Windows), and has done for many years. macOS doesn’t even try, but rather downsamples from the next integer, which guarantees it will be atrocious, much worse than a lower-resolution integer-scaled panel for many purposes. Linux can be finicky, but is slowly getting there, though downsampling is still common. (Me, I’ve been using Linux/Sway at 1.5× for the last five years.)
You’d get much better results by increasing density by a third in each direction: 2560×1600 is 252ppi, excellent for a 2× scaling factor. (The effective resolution is thus 1280×800.)
Skimming Google, there are pretty much are no laptops 12" and higher resolution than 1080x1200 that's current nor made by Apple.
And let's not get started on 12'' Android tablets...
But yes, considering that Framework's Chromebook is/was expensive (over $1k) for the class doesn't give a lot of faith that the 12in model would be any different. Though that was equipped with a 2k screen and had a 12th gen i5, so I genuinely wonder what kind of meetings happened to ship out a premium Chromebook (a segment that does not exist)
https://frame.work/laptop12
You’d think they could make their most popular pages static for now and serve them out of the CloudFlare cache, though.
The four hinges must stay synchronized under lift force from the user, but I haven't seen that being a problem on a Let's note, so it's probably good.
Their website was hugged to death, so I can't confirm.
I wonder how writing on the touch screen feels?
A laptop tablet hybrid that I can actually repair would be great. Would use tablet mode for image editing and hand-written notes.
I've been looking at a Raspberry Pi 5 paired w/ a Wacom One Gen 2 13 inch screen or a Movink 13 --- will probably stick with that since I prefer Wacom EMR (and have a big investment in it in terms of devices and styluses).
Physically pressing down a diving board is just asking for frustration. Sometimes I miss the separate left, right, and middle click buttons under the trackpad like the old days.
I _really_ hope they launch an AMD version (perhaps with an iGPU) soon after that. That and preferably with Libreboot support. This would make it the ideal portable laptop for me and thus I'd be able to (finally!) replace my X220T.
The 13th-gen Intels had miserable battery life and heat issues under load. If you could manage that, all four USB-C ports were full Thunderbolt ports equally capable of driving displays, PD, and USB 4 throughput.
The AMD line had considerably better performance-per-watt but rougher firmware support (and early on, really broken Linux kernel support that required Fedora or other rolling kernel release distros). It also couldn't deliver the same "every port does everything" promise that the Intel boards did, with some ports not supporting displays or USB 4, which significantly reduced the value of the expansion-card model to kind of a novelty.
On the 12, if it's likely also going to have a smaller batter than the 13, going only with 13th-gen Intels means it likely will be either a further step back in battery life vs. the 13 or throttled to extend the battery.
[1] https://youtu.be/-lErGZZgUbY?t=729
Both chips were Q1 '23, so the timing's not a great excuse. They were in HP's 2023 EliteBook G10 840 (1334U) and 845 (Ryzen 5 PRO 7540) laptops, and the 845 was better on both single- and especially multi-thread Cinebench R23, _much_ better in GPU loads and gaming, _and also_ lasted longer on battery.
I think Framework mostly just wants to target an education market with a mainboard experience that's lower maintenance than AMD has been for them. Fewer USB-C restrictions, less firmware drama.
Still hard to get excited about it being the _only_ available option, though.
Combined with properly prepared HW taking less power in modern standby than in S3, but it requires hardware/firmware/driver/userland confluence to work well
It feels odd having a load of closed source EFI stuff and then putting linux on top of it. Sure linux injects a bunch of firmware into hardware later in the boot, but it's still progress
I've been burned by a small SBC that had poor support, but on laptops/desktops never felt limited.
But people always sound so excited to libreboot their personal computer... Am I missing out or is it just nerd cred?
Still would like an end to end open source UEFI bootchain, most groups end when they hit the 60% of stuff they need for their limited use cases : - |
The other things is bug-fixing. The way it currently works is that bugs often only get fixed for one version and other issues like that.
Getting this stuff open and having upstream heavy fixing of bugs will imporve the ecosystem.
The other things is performance. Faster boot times are quite nice.
The other things is being able to better play with more advanced boot security concepts, booting with Bluetooth/NFC verification and so on.
And once its open, and you can more easily work with it, and its more available, hopefully more people do more interesting work with it.
That said, its not an absolute priority for me, but its just a better long term solution. So companies that push it are a big plus.
Linux on arm is very mature, but windows on arm not completely.
That being said, other companies could very well develop and sell boards for the frameworks laptop. So much so that iirc sifive did release a risc-v laptop board to use in the frameworks laptop case.
Meanwhile properly SBSA compliant chips aren't targeted at mobile market at all and thus often lack certain features or are too energy hungry.
There are a lot of more or less weird, very dedicated, very opinionated subcultures in the PC hardware world.
wut? Gamers love to pay extra for a tiny bit of less noise. Noctua and expensive water cooled systems are widespread in the gaming community.
Entirely passive (I THINK / recall there was no pump), heat based circulation, with just TONS of radiator surface and an unwieldy design. However for that entirely custom solution they could theoretically scale up with additional size.
Still, if someone's going _that_ overboard, the heat's getting dumped somewhere.
'Industrial Chilled Water' as in a connection to an external (to the room, maybe even building) pump, and an external cooler (usually evaporative cooling, could be mega radiators in the shade too) like you see at industrial sites.
https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard
ARM has nothing to do with being fanless or not, that's just whether or not you're happy with what 15w can get you or not.
Not many people are, which is why ARM laptops with fans are just if not even more common than ones without.
Also there's a single ARM SoC that isn't garbage at this power/performance bracket on the open market, and it's embattled with legal troubles (Qualcomm vs. ARM over Snapdragon X Elite). And while the X Elite CPU is great, the GPU and software for things like video deciding are bad and break regularly
On the plus side I'm hoping that it's the existence of framework that have convinced lenovo to stop soldering components in their new laptops, that's what put me off buying one and why I went with a framework.
Memory, CPU and GPU once piece of metal, sitting in a tiny box.
A regular PC in a regular case, it a lot more modular and upgradable.
It does seem like an interesting box, and matches against Apple Studio I would presume.
Yet customers of Apple are used to having (near) 0 user modifiable parts.
It might well have a good market, It might b a great box. It is unframeworky.
At first, Framework is "laptops that are repairable". But if you broaden what they are, they are a disruptor of direct-to-consumer computing equipment, with a core competency of repairability and upgradability.
An integrated CPU/RAM is a decrease in that measure, but it is for a valid benefit - a large improvement in performance for low-power graphics and AI software. They aren't sacrificing upgradability for aesthetic, and they continue to offer fully upgradable laptops.
I wonder if modular memory will continue to evolve and be competitive bandwidth wise with soldered.
That's the promise of CAMM2, which is supposed to enable socketed LPDDR with almost the same performance as soldered-down LPDDR. It's still pretty bleeding-edge though so it's hard to blame Framework for sticking with soldered memory for now.
I'd be more than happy to see CAMM2 in general laptops, but it will probably always be much weaker at shared GPU/CPU designs like Strix Halo, Grace, Apple's M series, etc.
The ceo kind of explains why in this video. In essence it seems to be a limitation of the chip from AMD
edit: it's not for me and I can totally just not buy one, but if one identified with their original mission and sees this as betrayal of that, it'd be hard to justify getting a framework laptop when it's their turn to upgrade.
RAM upgrades at reasonable prices, being able to buy the main board sans case, and supporting multiple OSes all point in that direction, without strictly being modular
The RAM is not upgradable.
FTA:
> Because the memory is non-upgradeable, we’re being deliberate in making memory pricing more reasonable than you might find with other brands.
> July 7 2022 3:26pm
> Framework’s mission is to fix consumer electronics - and we are doing that by respecting you and the planet. We have put this vision into everything we do by providing you with amazing products that are meant to last as long as possible by letting you upgrade and modify them over that lifetime to support your specific needs.
> Our mission is to reduce the amount of waste that is generated and energy that is expended and reduce our overall consumer electronics footprint, while providing a better product than you can get anywhere else. This includes using post-consumer-recycled aluminum and plastic in our products as well as recycled and recyclable packaging.
> We have just started this journey, and we are continually looking for ways to reduce our footprint and be even healthier for the environment. We’re happy to get ideas and suggestions on how we can do this. The Framework Community is a great place to share this.
You presume to have internalized Framework's core-values more than the founder/CEO? The box is not my cup of tea,but they are free to experiment.
His reaction in the livestream was along these lines when he semi-jokingly said "I'm surprised no one from the audience threw something at me"
At a larger event I would have kind of expected a "boo", but it seemed like a rather small gathering where most people knew each other. Unlike the live 12k Youtube chat, that was very surprised and disappointed at times.
Also, Framework doesn't need to make something for you to "build a PC". PCs are extremely modular already. They are solving a different problem here.
The question is how much different is a motherboard with soldered CPU vs. CPU and memory soldered. You seem to be of the opinion that it's a completely different product category, I'm of the opinion they're more the same than different. I don't remember the last time I didn't upgrade all three components at once.
> Depends on the context.
> Dollars, no. Murders, yes.
The point is it's a pretty critical component, so "just one" is doing a lot to downplay how critical a component it is. If we get rid of that one component, you're nowhere. So calling it "just one component" belies how critical a component it is.
> I don't remember the last time I didn't upgrade all three components at once.
Thank you for explaining your perspective. If they're a single component in your mind, and not modular, then no wonder we have such a disconnect.
My guess is that Framework had a unique opportunity with the AMD Ryzen AI and decided to capitalize on it to serve a fast-and-growing home market for this class of hardware, and the soldered LPDDR was a compromise considering the requirements of the CPU. If I had to choose between them offering this product with that restriction, or "sticking to their core values" and waiting for an alternative solution then I'm going to learn to live with the restriction. If the traffic queue wasn't just marketing BS, I assume many other people are also willing to live with it.
I want Framework to be a long-term successful company and that means making good use of their cash, and this gives them a safer opportunity to test a new product category. Maybe the result of this decision is an expansion of the category to include more modular options, at which point everyone wins.
One might maliciously (IMO) argue that the single motherboard in Framework products that you presumably find perfectly fine, could have been designed as several interconnected ones, that are individually replaceable. On the surface, it can seem like an unimpeachable criticism, but once you consider the cost in complexity, performance and BOM, then the "less modular" single-motherboard option becomes much more reasonable.
Framework went with soldered memory because that was the only way they could hir the memory bandwidth performance numbers they wanted for this product in the context of the segment it occupies. If you value the ability to replace/upgrade RAM over 256Gb/s, then this is not the product for you. If you think Framework shouldn't compete in this segment due to a confluence of ideological reasons and the technical limitations of slotted RAM, then the CEO disagrees with you, as do the future buyers of the compact desktop
FWIW I find the small form factor combined with the CPU and high-powered integrated GPU very appealing. I don't think I could build something with this form factor using off the shelf parts (someone correct me if I'm wrong)... it would end up needing a larger dedicated GPU.
I suspect their competition isn't actually people who build their own PCs, but people in the market for Mac Pros — they have a number of benefits over Apple here.
You can still buy the motherboard version and use your own case and PSU. That's better than not just the macs, but also many other mini PCs.
And considering the chip, it's still the most modular way to buy a Ryzen 395 for the foreseeable future.
I don't understand, but maybe someone else could explain.
Not an engineer though so please correct me. I only have a vague understanding of this.
There's none of that here. That's a concept for uncontrolled interfaces. This is a memory interface, where you either have a good signal or a flawed design. Things like ECC do exist, but those are to detect bit corruption in the memory, but a flawless communication between is still required.
At some point (if you go to high enough frequencies), the capacitance of the copper traces will become high enough (i.e. without any capacitor component connecting to a trace between a CPU and a RAM module) to prevent further frequency increases. One way to deal with that is to have shorter traces. This is exactly what CAMM memory modules do - they have shorter (total) traces than DIMM. Even shorter traces are possible if you get rid of modules completely (i.e. solder the RAM chips to the motherboard). Better yet is to place RAM and CPU cores on one chip, skipping even the motherboard traces between the CPU and RAM chips.
and games, having really speedy/low latency memory helps a lot with being competitive to some mid range dedicated GPUs
Unified RAM/VRAM is very nice for running LLMs locally, since you can get wayyyy more RAM than you typically can get VRAM on discrete GPUs. 128GB VRAM on discrete GPUs is 4x5090s — aka $8k just on GPU spend alone. This is $2k and it includes the CPU!
Of course, it'll be somewhat slower than a discrete GPU setup, but at a quarter of the cost, that's a reasonable tradeoff for most people I'd think. It should run Llama 3.1 70b (or various finetunes/LoRAs) quite easily, even with reasonably long context.
Feels like a stab in the back.
Arm laptops are plenty competitive with the x86 space with the snapdragons now.
But you probably want M.2 slots over a single x16 slot.
i just built a mini ITX gaming PC for a friend, and this one looks pretty good for quality/$. good enough that i wouldn't be surprised if these get snapped up and re-sold for more than the sticker price
i think it makes more sense to think of it as a high-end console, given that basically everything is soldered, though
For one thing, the price per FPS for gaming is going to be terrible. This price can get you a serious rig with much better performance.
Gaming is a very specific workload that almost entirely depends on the GPU. It is hard to even purchase a CPU that performs poorly in gaming by accident, or unless you are a hyper-specific type of gamer (like someone who plays e-sports titles and expects 300FPS for optimal reaction time, or someone who plays extremely CPU-intense games like Stellaris).
You don’t want a gaming PC with soldered GPU, even if you are using it as a “console,” even if you prioritize small size. You really want the ability to replace graphics cards because none of the other components important to gaming age out very quickly.
Here are all of the parts in my system that are older than my current graphics card (2024):
- Motherboard
- CPU
- RAM
- Power Supply
- SSD
- Case
- CPU cooler
Here is a list of those parts that are older than my previous graphics card (2020)
- RAM
- Case
- Power Supply
- Motherboard
- SSD
Here is a list of all the components that are older than the prior graphics cards before that! (Year unknown)
- Motherboard
- RAM
- Power Supply
Arguably I didn’t even need to upgrade the CPU, the cooler upgrade was necessitated by the CPU upgrade, and the case upgrade and SSD were both just personal wants and not needs.
Basically everything that matters besides my graphics card has stayed very constant but upgrading the GPU has increased my gaming performance by over 100% in the period I have described.
from what i can tell, a 4070 alone is ~$750. this thing is apparently $799 for the CPU+GPU+RAM+motherboard all soldered together ($300 more for case+PSU+SSD)
if the CPU+RAM+motherboard are costing me $50, i don't really care if i have to throw them out along with the GPU
from the specs, a mobile 4070 looks like its basically a 4060 ti, underclocked to ~60%
i haven't bought a laptop gpu since ~2008. from what i remember, they used to at least put "mobility" in the name, or throw and 'm' after the number, or something
That sucks. I’ve had better luck with Intel’s drivers for their first series of dGPU’s.
If this works with tinygrad’s AMD driver, that would then interest me.
Me & my 7900 XTX will be quite grateful if it does.
Otherwise as it stands the 128 GB configuration seems pretty niche.
EDIT: looking deeper it seems like the "Ryzen AI" is it's own thing with a different implementation than ROCm, so it could be interesting but might not help with ROCm.
For my mini PC I couldn't get the EGPU to work with Linux so I'm stuck on Windows for now... But I play a few games that are Windows only ( anti cheat) so this is for the best.
With a desktop there's a limit to what Valve can commit to. There's not a single controller firmware to support, and probably not even a consistent GPU setup to cache for. The extent of realistic support for these AMD boards is kinda fully realized at this point. Proton is, and will remain, a plug-and-play experience for AMD users that own supported hardware.
Valve as a company could shut down tomorrow, and AMD users could still use Proton to play Windows games as long as their GPU is Vulkan 1.2 compliant.
For gaming specifically, so many micro ATX motherboards offer Gen 5 PCIe, which can handle a proper video card, double the RAM, and the smaller cases are only slightly larger than this Framework.
So I'd say yes.
My gaming needs are pretty tame to the point that my current 3080Ti has been and remains overkill (usually 2+ year old titles @ 2560x1440), and as time has gone on I’ve come to value silence (which the FW Desktop seems good at, overcooling a laptop APU with a single fan desktop cooler) over raw power. In addition, the discrete GPU story continues to escalate to all-new levels of eye-wateringly expensive stupidity which makes me not want to buy any discrete GPU until Nvidia and AMD bring their prices back down to earth and that whole mess with the new Nvidia power connector is properly resolved, and that’s to say nothing about the unstoppable creep of GPU size, heat, and power consumption.
If I could sell my full size gaming tower and replace it with an effortlessly inaudible yet reasonably powerful air cooled SFF box, I might just do it. In all truth I could probably get by fine with this first gen Framework desktop, but it would make more sense to wait for a second or third gen where the APU's graphical power comes into the range of upper-tier RTX 3000 cards so I don’t need to use framegen as a crutch for decent framerates.
When I look around, gaming pcs are mostly about big and visible, sometimes reasonably silent, almost never compact, inconspicuous and silent.
To me there is a market for this kind of product, and it hasn’t been addressed properly yet.
Since I have so far failed in my quest, I now use GeForce Now from my Mac mini which is a good approximation of what I want.
Because the market you describe has very heavy expectations, and very exacting taste.
(And critically, the capability of building one themselves.)
Kind of but not really. Any SFF build that’s anywhere close to similar in size and capabilities to the Framework is probably going to be making considerably more noise, even with an AIO liquid cooler.
Between consoles and macs/macbooks, the writing is on the wall and cpu+cpu+unified memory is the future for performance. I will absolutely be looking at buying one of framework desktops instead of building a new PC soon.
I also saw that while it competed well with a 4070 at average frame rates, that the 1% lows were twice as fast. The speculation I saw was that the 12GB vram limit was causing issues on the Nvidia side.
Having twice the bandwidth, dynamically allocated VRAM, and very decent cores seems like a solid workhouse that it's more about better worst case performance (when you are heavily cache missing or running out of vram).
Sure some will buy a top of the line CPU from Intel or AMD, buy a larger case, and buy a RTX 5080 or 5090, for the 98% of the rest this strix halo will be plenty and will use less power, create less noise, and generate less heat.
But hey, they've refused to provide GPUs with lots of RAM at a cheap price so competition, y'all.
Nvidia's actual counterpart would be their DIGITS mini-PC, which has a similar big-and-slow memory architecture.
So its better than 4090.
The reason its better with a less powerful GPU is context switching.
"AMD also claims its Strix Halo APUs can deliver 2.2x more tokens per second than the RTX 4090 when running the Llama 70B LLM (Large Language Model) at 1/6th the TDP (75W)."
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-slides-c...
The only parts which can be customized for this product are the presence or absence of a handle, the cooler's fan, the case's side and some front tiles. That's it. The m.2 SSD and the wifi are the only components which can be replaced.
This isn't the kind of product I wanted Framework to make. I was hoping they'd make hardware which can be repaired and which has components available for it. The motherboard has all the chips and everything else soldered on it. The most expensive part of the computer needs to be replaced if a voltage regulator or some other part found on the motherboard fails. There's no cheap $ 100-200 motherboard to replace in this product. It's the same problem as with Apple's Macs.
Can someone at Framework answer this question: what do the customers do with your Framework Desktop hardware once it breaks and you no longer support it? It's e-waste. What happens when the motherboard in my computer dies? I buy only a replacement motherboard while keeping the RAM, the CPU and GPU, unlike for Framework Desktop. What happens when the GPU I have is no longer useful or supported? I buy only a new GPU.
This board doesn't even have PCI-E for a GPU. This product is only good as long as the iGPU provides the required performance for whatever application is of interest. This is a weakness the Framework 13 motherboard shares. There's no way to remove the board from its case to use it with a PCI-E x16 GPU with the right PSU.
AMD is known to abandon their customers once they release newer dGPUs and SoCs with iGPUs. This can be easily observed if you review the countless reports for crashes with amdgpu on Linux. The amdgpu driver has various bugs which lead to crashes of the GPU or of the entire machine. They're also not good at shipping CPU microcode for consumer CPUs to address hardware bugs and CVEs.
As a side note, even the Framework AI HX laptops are extremely expensive for what they offer in terms of hardware. A laptop which goes above $ 2000 without RAM, an SSD, a charger and without any adapters for those bays seems to be a good deal? That's absurd. There are laptops with 32 GB of RAM, the same CPU, better displays, a 1 TB SSD, a charger and all the required ports present on the laptop for less than $ 2000 (including taxes).
I hope someone from Framework reads this. I want repairable products which can be upgraded without replacing a monolithic part which is the entire computer.
Other noteworthy things
- their site went down hard with a queue to see the site... downright absurd
- they haven't posted the specs of the Framework 12
- there are still no actual repair centers which repair their products, no physical stores or sellers which sell Framework products outside of their site
- there have been reports of people who didn't have their hardware problems with Framework laptops addressed, even LTT addressed such issues
Most of the manufactured Framework-compatible accessories are skins, wraps, and expansion card organizers. Cooler Master dropped one mainboard case and seemingly bounced from the laptop project altogether. There are a bunch of cool DIY projects, a handful of which have been productized, all of them niche.
The community marketplace concept never materialized. The extensibility promise of the 16's input modules haven't materialized. The only third-party 13 mainboard that exists after 3.5 years is a cool but ultimately impractical RISC dev board/proof-of-concept; the idea that the Framework mainboard would become a laptop equivalent to the ITX/ATX standards in desktops just did not happen, and Framework's decision to start shipping a bunch of different mainboard formats means it never will.
It's particularly depressing to me that the only modular component that seems to be compatible across the 12, 13, 16, and Desktop seems to be the expansion cards, which are a fun concept but at the end of the day are just a form factor for USB-C port adapters.
I'm honestly excited about the 12 being a supposedly cheaper repairable option, although seeing this weird Desktop ready to go before the 12 is a boggling decision. I have no interest in spending $1k-$2k+ for a novel mini-PC using laptop components, in a mostly plastic case, with a bespoke motherboard crammed with soldered-on bespoke parts (even for good reasons!) that are designed to _not_ be repaired or replaced.
(By the way, why _doesn't_ the desktop use the Framework mainboard form factor? I'd be interested in a genuinely larger mainboard-compatible desktop case with more airflow, designed for a specialty Desktop mainboard but compatible with the laptop mainboards too.
A mini-ITX board that's less modular than a commodity mini-ITX board, in a mini-ITX case that isn't competitive with commodity mini-ITX cases, is such a weird choice in Framework's "keep using your mainboards" pitch. If they're going to ship a bespoke board with little to no added value when installed outside of their own case, why doesn't that board use _their own board format_?)
Hell, Cooler Master's MasterFrame line is a better execution of what I'd expect and want out of Framework shipping an *TX-compatible desktop case than Framework's case looks to be, and Cooler Master apparently worked on Framework's case too!)
And even then, the 12 is just another set of components that aren't cross-compatible with the 13. If they were selling a convertible 13 case, or even just a stylus/touchscreen display for the 13, I'd be buying it right now.
Even the 13's new AMD boards aren't exciting because I expect them to ship with the same or worse firmware and driver stability or compatibility issues that still haven't been solved on the 7040-series 13 mainboards a year after shipping them, not because Framework is a terrible company but because their support from AMD has apparently been a nightmare. I finally have my 13 stable and expect a new generation of AMD mainboard to just chuck it back into firmware hell.
That Framework keeps taking VC money just to design and ship new laptop lines when their existing lines aren't stable, _and_ ship a less-modular, less-repairable novelty in the Desktop that t...
There is substantial x86 market demand for local inference that can compete with Apple. AMD/Framework 128GB for $2K will be competitive.
> A mini-ITX board that's less modular than a commodity mini-ITX board
LLMs need LPDIMM for high-bandwidth memory and efficient power. mITX board allows interop with a galaxy of existing mITX cases, including NAS.
> same or worse firmware and driver stability or compatibility issues that still haven't been solved on the 7040-series 13 mainboards a year after shipping them, not because Framework is a terrible company but because their support from AMD has apparently been a nightmare.
We're inching towards AMD's 2026 target for open-source firmware, which will hopefully help all AMD OEMs.
It's just not catching on, because of course it isn't. Manufacturers have no incentive to let you upgrade parts on your own.
There just isn't a free lunch here, it's an inherent design tradeoff for these kinds of chips. The CPU is just along for the ride, in this case.
My completely-bullshit opinion is something like "I think it's attractive for a lot of mid-range or lower end SKUs, so you'll see it more frequently." It's attractive because you save a lot of power and components with this kind of design. It would be interesting to see this kind of design (APU) in a socket-able factor too, but who knows. It's also attractive for a certain class of high-end design too (like Grace Hopper), but I think you're going to see RAM sticks for a while yet in the mid-to-very-high-range.
This is completely bullshit because it is based more on vibes and basic technical design points than any kind of market forecasting or anything like that.