> ...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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
The pitch for the Framework laptop is that it is repairable/upgradable/modular. Something that is uncommon for laptops nowadays.
This is the opposite. Desktops are modular by default, so much is that my computer is like the Ship of Theseus, I never changed it, but upgrade to upgrade, it is a completely different machine than it once was (it started off as a 486!). This one is not.
The Framework desktop doesn't look bad, but now, I am confused about the meaning of the brand. It is as if Tesla made a diesel car.
I agree. I was an early adopter and have a Framework 13 11th gen intel (batch 4) and have been generally happy with it. Except the keyboard stopped working and I had to replace it, ~100 tiny screws later (and one stripped screw). And the battery drains fast (~24 hours) when suspended. And except that it won't turn on anymore without plugging into a particular USB-C port with a "dumb" USB cable (the basic 5V 900mA type) even with a full battery charge. And there hasn't been a BIOS update for this mainboard since Sep 2022.
I understand that a new company with a new product is going to have issues. But I would have strongly preferred they spent the time and effort (and money) fixing or replacing these 1st gen mainboards rather than branching out into a very non-Framework area like desktop gaming PCs.
In case it helps someone: my Framework had rapid battery drain in suspend. Around 10% per hour.
Turns out the Samsung EVO NVMe I installed had really high power draw (I guess it's meant for performance desktops?). I replaced it with a WD Blue and now I lose negligible power while suspended.
Curious if you're running Linux, I recall seeing a discussion about there being a bug with that on Framework that causes it to not suspend properly and burn energy.
I had that issue on my batch 5 11th gen. There's an issue with the rechargeable CMOS battery they included (that isn't present on the later 12th and 13th gen) that when it stops taking a charge your laptop stops turning on unless you do some arcane process to reset it.
They provide a "repair" kit that's basically a dummy CMOS battery that hooks in to the normal power system that prevents the issue from occurring again.
Also just FYI, there was a BIOS update in June of last year (3.20).
>There's an issue with the rechargeable CMOS battery
I am aware of the issue as described in [1] and the fix in [2]. However, my support request has gone unanswered for a year, as was my second support request. In addition, I have doubts as to whether this fix (which requires soldering!) will work.
I was not aware of an updated BIOS [3], foolishly believing the output of 'fwupdmgr' after following the instructions in [4]. It looks like I'll need to find a USB stick and update via EFI shell. Thanks for the tip!
But still, I think they should do more for early customers before expanding out well beyond their core market!
Thanks. I submitted another support request, and this time got a form email back. I will quote it here in full. Let me say that I am deeply unimpressed. They require that I disassemble the laptop to take a photograph of the mainboard, and send it to them (somehow, they do not say) and then perform major surgery on the mainboard that THEY designed poorly. What's more, they say that YOU have all liability for the repair and its consequences. How is this acceptable? What happened to a manufacturer sending an RMA and a box and repairing the mistake that they made? Is THIS what we sign up for when we support "repairable" computers, that we should expect to have to solder our own motherboards when they are poorly designed? And that they require a photograph of the mainboard (which requires disassembly) is icing on the cake.
I truly regret my purchase of a Framework laptop. Truth be told, I've never, ever had to repair a laptop more than this one, and I'd prefer a product that I didn't have to repair at all (and if there is a defect in manufacture or design, that the manufacturer take all necessary steps to remedy that error). If I was attracted to their products, including their desktop offering, I would think twice before spending money with them. I really really wish I'd put the money toward a new M-series macbook.
Heck their reminder to keep the BIOS updated makes no mention of the fact that their instructions for Linux are bogus, as their UEFI blobs are not available to fwupdmgr. What's more, to get to 3.20 you have to first upgrade to 3.17, all through EFI boot. It's a really rotten experience.
==============
PLEASE READ THIS MESSAGE FULLY!
This is an automated message sent to all customers that have either been identified as having a power-related issue with an 11th Gen Intel Core Mainboard or have specifically requested either a replacement RTC Battery or the solderable RTC Battery Substitute.
If you’ve needed to perform the Mainboard Reset procedure more than once on your 11th Gen system or the laptop will not power on even after performing the reset, your RTC/CMOS battery may no longer be holding a charge. There are a couple options available that the Framework Support team can provide to resolve the issue:
1. Framework Support can provide a replacement RTC/CMOS battery to you, free of charge, regardless of the status of your warranty. Simply request this option and provide your Framework Order Number along with a clear image/photo of the serial number of your Mainboard. If you do not have access to the Order Number, please provide the email used to complete the purchase on the Framework website. To access the Mainboard serial number, please follow the steps in the guide HERE and find the serial label between the memory slots. Also, please verify your shipping information/address (only in supported countries/regions) to avoid unnecessary back and forth communications. For information on acceptable shipping addresses, please see the following article HERE . If you receive a replacement RTC/CMOS battery it is important to make sure to let it fully recharge by keeping your laptop plugged into power for at least 24 hours. We also recommend keeping your laptop plugged into power during long periods of non-use to avoid letting the RTC/CMOS battery fully discharge. Note that even a normal 5V/900mA USB-C power adapter will sufficiently trickle charge the system and RTC/CMOS battery.
2. Framework Support now has an alternative option for those with the technical skills to solder electrical components. This alternative RTC/CMOS Battery Substitution is a single solder point component which replaces the coin cell battery with a circuit that keeps the RTC subsystem powered from the main battery. You can find the step by step instructions for installing this module in this guide. PLEASE NOTE: You should NOT request this option if you or the person designated for this rework do not have sufficient electronics soldering experience. While it is only a single solder point, failing to solder this correctly can result in damage to the system that is not covered under Framework’s Limited Warranty. If you accept the associated liability, please request this option and provide a clear image/photo of the serial number of your mainboard and your Framework Order Number. If you do not have access to the Order Number, please provide the email used to complete the purchase on the Framework website. To access the Mainboard serial number, please follow the steps in the guide HERE and find the serial label between the memory slots. Also, please verify your shipping information/address (only in supported countries/regions) to avoid unnecessary back and forth communications. For information on acceptable shipping addresses, please see the following article HERE .
Finally, we also recommend keeping your system up to date with the latest firmware releases. Please see the following knowledge base article which has links to the latest BIOS/Firmware and Framework Driver Bundles for each generation of Framework Laptop.
If you have provided the required imagery and your order number, one of our staff will be with you to provide an update on your request. Thank you for your patience and we apologize for any frustration this issue may have caused.
Regards,
Framework Support
I got the same email, and I agree they should've taken responsibility for their obvious design flaw and fixed it themselves free of charge.
Also I will again agree that my Batch 4 (or was it 5? I can't remember) FW13 is the most I've had to repair a laptop as well. I'm just gonna chalk that up to them technically being pre-full-production units and hope they have improved their QA in the later gens.
However I will also add that I like having the option to fix it myself (which is something I have some amount of skill/enjoyment in doing) which is certainly NOT an option you'd have with that M-series MacBook (or really any other brand of laptop)
I was also an early adopter (batch 2) I ended up buying a m2 macbook air to replace it because the thing overheated and down clocked to 200Mhz (yes megahertz, not gigahertz) constantly and it was unusable. It sits around unused, I can't even give it away to family because I don't want to hear complaints about it being unusable. I just don't trust framework to not have issues.
I know very few people that do anything other than upgrade their GPU or SSD during the entire lifespan of their computer. Maybe when I was younger I'd upgrade the RAM after saving up, but am fortunate enough now to be able to buy what I want up front.
This product is for me.
A few years ago I tried to repurpose a desktop with a bad motherboard, but it was impossible to find a replacement for the 7-year-old CPU. eBay prices were more than the original MSRP, and at that point it was cheaper to buy new parts for the oldest still-selling generation.
I'm already replacing everything except the SSD and GPU with every upgrade anyway, now it will just be the SSD but I can keep the case.
Something I've noticed over the years is that a lot of PC enthusiast discussion seems to be self-selecting for those most likely to chase the latest hardware, which affects how they think and talk about future proofing or upgrade ability. The challenge with x86 PC is that because the platform is so flexible it casts the widest net over huge amounts of use cases and circumstances. The example that comes to mind is criticism over intel vs AMD chipsets/sockets with longer compatibility, but it comes down to what your demands are plus where you buy in the cycle of other components (DDR4 vs DDR5) and needed support. There are trade-offs everywhere.
Definitely. My last self built desktop ($8k total in 2012-ish) lasted a decade under heavy use like M/ECAD and compiling stuff, with only a midlife upgrade from SSD to NVME. When you buy top of the line cutting edge parts that are binned for overclocking, they remain competitive for a very long time, especially now that we’ve hit diminishing returns. Now all you need to make sure is that it’s got enough PCIe lanes if going to a performance build. I only retired the desktop because of how much power it burns and our electricity rates going up here in SoCal.
That 64gb OCed 3200 (maybe 3500) mHz DDR3 RAM for example, kept up with DDR4 speeds for most of that decade when I benchmarked every few years. Intel extreme processor, workstation motherboard, and GTX Titans also kept chugging along. I’ve been looking at some of the higher end DDR5 coming down the pipeline and those are also likely to be on the higher end of performance for a decade while the consumer parts catch up. The only problem is that the workstation motherboard market seems to have disappeared.
SFFs and laptops share many parts, and of course the new mini desktop has 2 of the framework compatible bays for your choice of usb/network/audio that should work today and be able to be upgraded later.
I don't do much computing on the move, that my phone can't handle. But a desktop (that generally lasts twice as long as a laptop and costs half as much) is pretty interesting to me.
Also keep in mind that framework sold a small chassis compatible with their laptop boards, so if you upgrade your laptop main board you could rehost the old one in a small desktop chassis.
Seems like a natural expansion for framework and might well get them more customers and more sales per customer.
> I never changed it, but upgrade to upgrade, it is a completely different machine than it once was (it started off as a 486!)
Nit: You can believe that story, but there's zero chance that at some point you didn't upgrade the case, motherboard, CPU and RAM possibly at the same time. If you replace 90% of what makes a computer, does it make sense to say you "never changed" it? At what point do you consider it "changed"?
This Framework desktop also lets you swap motherboard, CPU and RAM in one go, why does it not fit your definition?
The difference is that The Ship of Theseus had all its parts replaced one by one, in a long period of time. If you replace 90% of the ship at the same time (RAM, CPU and Motherboard), then the analogy breaks down.
I didn't say it's not understandable, just that it breaks down - i.e. doesn't apply anymore.
The point of an analogy is to point out how our intuition tells us it's the same boat, despite having no parts in common with the initial boat.
As other comment mentioned, if you keep the sails and rebuild a new boat around it, no person in their right mind would feel that it's the same boat. It's very clearly a new boat, and the analogy breaks down.
I agree. There's a lot of options for very small PC cases that will fit a dedicated GPU and regular itx components (I'm running a midori 5L system, it's great, don't ignore the instruction to use loctite on the bolts you will have pain) - I don't think the desktop market needs this the same way the laptop market needed the earlier framework devices.
The soldered RAM is surprising for Framework, and doubly surprising for being so in a form-factor that usually doesn't have soldered RAM.
Similar to what other commenters have expressed, it just seems like they shouldn't have built this product if they couldn't figure out the soldered RAM bit.
The statement above is that one would expect Framework to have chosen a platform which does not require soldered RAM, not that Framework kept such an option by choosing this AMD part.
All that aside, I absolutely can't wait for desktops to decide to go the same route of having 4 memory channels instead of 2. Right now the only way to have >2 channels is to buy workstation/server class stuff or an APU.
Sadly there's no alternative if you want 256 bits wide at the moment. Well a previous generation threadripper with a huge increase in power consumption and requiring a discrete GPU.
BTW, careful with "channels". Todays normal desktops and laptops (besides the strix halo and apple pro/max/ultra) are 128 bits wide. But in the DDR4 -> DDR5 transition they doubled the number of channels to 4. However the strix halo biggest advantage is the extra memory bandwidth going from 128 bits wide to 256 bits wide.
Finally the technology of the ps5 and XboxX comes to laptops, tablets, and small desktops.
From their LTT video, it looked like they chose to do Desktop because of the AMD platform (and not the either way around, where they planned a desktop product and then chose AMD strix halo). Apparently setting up the manufacturing pipeline for laptops built on strix halo is expensive as of now and there are only two laptops in the whole market using it. So Frame.work choose to go the desktop route to save on cost while still making the platform available for everyone.
The architecture was their choice. It's completely possible to build a PC with that form factor which does not have soldered RAM, so it's strange that they went with it. Their brand with laptops is supposed to be 'more repairable' but they've chosen to make a desktop PC that's less repairable than their laptops are? It doesn't make any sense with the rest of their lineup. The person who would want this product is the opposite of the person who would want their other products.
That market, "repairable modular desktops", is extremely saturated. This only exists because nobody was putting the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 in anything, so they got gifted the entire market of "GPUs with more than 32gb of RAM that aren't Apple." And then a desktop because fitting this in a laptop is hard (hence why nobody else is doing it, either)
> This only exists because nobody was putting the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 in anything... And then a desktop because fitting this in a laptop is hard (hence why nobody else is doing it, either)
The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 was paper launched a month ago. What Framework announced here is just another pre-order (even batch 1 won't ship until Q3). There are dozens of other systems, including mini-PCs, announced months ago which are set to launch before this. Small laptops were actually the first 395+ products to launch, hence this month's benchmark reviews all used them. E.g. https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/gaming-laptops/a...
I would not be surprised if one will be able to get a full 128 GB 395+ mini PC for less than the cost of the Framework Desktop baseboard before the Framework Desktop actually starts arriving in hands. What you're buying here is a premium to be able to replace the shell and front USB ports.
Where can I find those mini-PCs? The HP Z2 Mini G1a is "Coming Soon". If this is to be believed:
"2025年5月以降販売開始予定", which translate to "Sales scheduled to start after May 2025"
That is Q2 2025 - at the earliest.
I haven't found any other with a committed release/ship date.
Even the Asus Z13 laptops with the 395+ have no shipping date yet.
Looking at the two GMKtec systems with their rattling fans I have here, I would rather take the Framework system where I can easily swap the fan. Cooling those 100-120W will take space and air flow.
They were announced months ago, not shipping months ago. Framework announce Q1 and is shipping Q3. Again, keep in mind the CPU itself only launched last month. This is the real reason the 395 had not been put in anything yet.
Plenty of folks on Reddit have already received shipment (not order) confirmation of the Z13. It looks like even more as of this morning. I doubt if any have actually fully received said shipments yet as it has only been a couple days since launch. It'll likely remain pretty out of stock unless you managed to get an order immediately at launch, again due to the paper launch of the 395 last month and low 395 availability until Q2.
I didn't know HP was making one too! That'll be exciting as it's easier to order that at my work than e.g. an ASUS one or what have you.
I don't know anything about RAMs or their bus size. Is this something that will be "fixed" in the future, idk, with DDR6? Meaning we can have replacable RAM with such bus.
Problem is there is no socket available for thin/light/low power CPUs to have a 256 bit wide bus.
So to ensure 256 bits @ 8000 MHz works well AMD did it in the same package. In theory they could A) ship a halo without ram B) design a new socket, C) allow motherboard makers to pick 2 x CUDIMMs or 4x DDR5 dimms. Not sure that would buy them much market though.
As apple and others have proved, not many care about replaceable dimms, especially if it gives them 2-3x the performance and/or better perf/watt.
Apparently not. In Linus Tech Tips latest video, the Framework CEO says they talked to AMD about it and that one of their engineers ran some simulations and found the stability would degrade too far for it to be possible.
Honestly... I wonder why they didn't consider CAMM2? The bandwidth and signal integrity rivals that of soldiered memory. They could have had the best of both worlds, really.
A single LPCAMM2 module is supposed to be all the RAM for a laptop, so it’s 128 bit wide. You’d need two LPCAMM for this, not four. And they are currently available in 32G and 64G varieties ($180/$330). So they aren’t absurdly priced, if they were in stock.
“Dual channel” is not a thing with CAMM. CAMM is 128 bits wide. To feed a 256bit wide memory controller, you need 2 CAMM modules. LPCAMM2 uses 4 memory packages. The observed number of packages next to the APU on this is 8. So you need 2 modules.
It's not exactly an out of the park win though as it's only $100-$200 cheaper and it trends poorly the farther from comparing base models you go (particularly after 64 GB, for which you need to leave the Mini family for the Studio). By the time you get to 128 GB, which you'd want for the 70B class AI models, you end up back at the original statement.
Huh. Ate my words then. I briefly checked Apple's page and didn't see them.
However those are the base M4 chip and not the M4 Pro. You need the M4 Pro to get competitive in GPU compute numbers for a more like to like comparison. The M4 Pro mini comes out at $1800 with the 48GB option, or $2000 for 64GB. For the same price the Framework machine gets you 128GB.
I think you're probably right comparing to the M4 Pro would make more sense but keep in mind you don't really need much compute, it's just that the M4 Pro has memory bandwidth more similar to the AI Max 395+ while the "normal" M4 doesn't.
Every large AI model is heavy memory bandwidth constrained to the point my 9800X3D (with the extra L3 cache) and 128 GB/s memory attached is only 60% utilized running a 32 GB model in CPU only mode (no NPU, iGPU, or GPU offload enabled). Really small AI models can start to be compute bound but, at that point, you don't really need the 32 GB of memory anymore and probably just want a normal GPU.
I saw that, and I'm curious if that's a death-knell for LPCAMM ram. My understanding was that the entire point of that new standard was to allow for the higher ram speeds and lower latencies etc that you would normally get with soldered ram, but in a modular, swappable package.
If LPCAMM already can't keep up with requirements when it is barely even out, then my guess is it won't fare well going forward.
So 1 of 2 things is probably true:
AMD is not being completely truthful with their statements that LPCAMM wasn't able to work (maybe it was just more difficult/complicated than they were willing to do, but it could work or
latency/speed requirements have already outpaced what LPCAMM can provide and soldered ram is the future.
I really hope it's the former, but it wouldn't be the first time something like the second has occurred. Apparently cache also used to be a separate, swappable component before it became integrated into the die. RAM might end up going the same way.
The non-MAX Ryzen laptops also announced today actually use socketed RAM.
I guess they'd claim it is only the MAX AMD procs which force soldered RAM, but since they could as well have used a non-MAX chip (and correspondingly reduce the price) this just shows how much of this is an arbitrary, and therefore questionable, decision from Framework rather than any restriction AMD sets.
Yes, those are the ones with a 128 bit memory bus that can reuse designs from previous generations. Nearly every laptop and desktop has has 128 bit memory for the last few decades, the strix halo is the first with 256 bit wide x86 targeted at tablets, laptops, and SFFs. Much like the m1/m2/m4 pro. The M3 pro for some reason decided on 192 bits wide.
I don’t think I’ve upgraded a desktop machine for about 10 years. I usually buy a 1-3 year old corporate desktop and use it for 2-4 years, buy another one and throw the old one on eBay.
They seem to be partnering with AMD and AMD has this new nice chip, they couldn't get it into a laptop, so they made a quick desktop.
It seems more like a way to launch a mini-desktop. They can later offer alternative mainboards that fit in that desktop (or anyother).
Yes, its a strange first product, but I think its mostly because they wanted to be early with releasing this AMD chip. Seems to me AMD was looking for partners to push this chip out for 'AI'.
I think it's an offering for companies that would like to get onboard with Framework but would prefer to only have one contract / contact for their laptops and desktops.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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`.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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...
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.
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.
Congrats on beating HP Z2 Mini G1a and Nvidia Project Digits to market with 128GB of unified memory for LLMs, with bonus Framework port flexibility and a better price than Apple equivalents.
Does the desktop have a discrete physical TPM chip (needed for DRTM support on Windows/Linux/Qubes)? At present, AMD's PSP firmware emulates a "mobile" fTPM that does not support SKINIT.
Would you consider a future model with AMD Ryzen AI Max "Pro" SoC, which has additional security features?
We've been moving to fTPM (AMD's Pluton TPU) in our last couple of generations, including on Framework Desktop. This is something where if we see strong demand to go back to dTPM that we can look at for future generations.
Virtualization: interrupts, vIOMMU, nested paging, GMET, SLAT
Security: memory encryption, Windows Device Guard, VBS, Secured Core
Management: DASH for rack/cluster
LLM opacity makes inference hardware a target for silent subversion and manipulation of LLM output. Ryzen PRO security features can be used to configure Linux and Windows systems that verify integrity on every system launch.
Sorry to cross your excellent questions, but it doesn’t seem they are beating HP Z2 mini G1a to market. HP announced first week of January that it will be “available in spring”, while now framework announced for Q3.
It also seems HP will use the PRO version of the chip.
Kudos to framework for announcing the price and anchoring the market though!
Hi Nirav! I don't have a question but I just wanted to say I'm a superfan of Framework. I love my AMD 13!
I'm as cynical as it gets when it comes to tech companies, but Framework is the only one that seems to be on track to actually make the world a better place. Please keep doing what you're doing, stick to the mission, and I'll be a customer for life.
Also please make a smartphone so I can finally be on an all-Framework stack! :)
Before I get into my slew of questions, I am absolutely thrilled to see the return of late-90s transparent colored housings and the like! I'm also happy to see the updated non-Windows keyboard using the Framework logo rather than the generic "Super" text.
#1. Any insight into the 4x PCIe slot not having the end of the slot open which would allow the user to still physically insert 8x or 16x PCIe cards?
#2. Considering a lot of people would use the desktop with ethernet, is the wifi m.2 slot keyed to only accept wifi cards or can it fit a 3rd NVMe SSD as well? (maybe an idea to also pass along to the RISC-V mainboard guys)
#3. Lastly, any chance of revisiting the possibility of upgradable RAM on future desktop models i.e. Zen6 "big APU" if CAMM modules and the like aren't so bleeding edge? (it's looking like DDR6 for example might be CAMM-only) I mean, the fact that CAMM modules lay flat would open the opportunity to have them placed directly on the backside of the CPU which would theoretically result in very short trace lengths relative to front-side CAMM (let alone DIMM).
EDIT #4. Do these Ryzen Max chips support s1/s3 sleep like traditional socketable desktops? (though it sounds like it's starting to become less supported on AM5 sadly)
BONUS. Keyboard/touchpad module(s) for laptop(s) with three (left, middle, right) separate physical mouse buttons when? :P (Heck, on the 16" laptop there's already suspicious blank spaces both above and below the touchpad where they'd fit perfectly...)
There's absolutely nothing repairable about this computer. The motherboard is the entire computer. Only the storage can be replaced.
Do you plan to make computers which can actually be repaired? How exactly is the Framework Desktop any better than what Apple is doing with the Mac? I prefer to build my own machines. Why would I ever choose such a product which can't have parts replaced over something better which enables me to repair and upgrade my computer?
I ask because you were on "Buy now!" which also tackles greenwashing. I fail to see how this product is any better than all of the disposable junk sold by other companies (soldered RAM, soldered CPU, no PCI-E, no second NIC, no expandability of any kind).
Do you plan to sell products with PCI-E ports for dedicated GPUs and other devices?
Has Framework's customer support improved? Do you plan to do something about that? I've read countless posts from people who state they didn't receive a reply from Framework's customer support or that their hardware problems were never resolved. Why should a new customer trust your company?
It seems that the Framework Desktop 1st gen has a 4x PCI-E port. That's not exactly useful for a GPU. I've learned this after watching the LTT video.
> Why would I ever choose such a product which can't have parts replaced over something better which enables me to repair and upgrade my computer?
Because unified memory can't be socketed due to signal integrity issues. Framework asked AMD if there's a possibility and they investigated it, but found that it was just not possible.
I recommend watching the LinusTechTips video about the new framework products. They answered all your questions.
I'm aware of all the limitations they've brought up and how it was sold to the public. It's not as if someone forced them to build this product. They've chosen to build it this way.
This product goes against their principles of building products which are more environmentally friendly. They've done this for the laptops by not forcing people to buy a new laptop when their motherboard is dead or no longer fast enough for the software they run. It's also possible to replace the keyboard, the hinge, the battery, the RAM, the wifi module, the SSD, the touchpad, the case, the display and the expansion modules.
This Framework Desktop 1st gen can have the following components replaced: wifi, SSD, CPU fan, maybe the heatsink, some front panel IO modules, some decorative tiles on the front, the PSU and some parts of the case. A single broken regulator or failing memory chip forces the owner to replace the entire computer. One is forced to replace the entire thing if they have no option to get someone to find the relevant part, desolder the existing one and solder the new one on. This is also not an option for the CPU.
This means that any kind of damage forces the owner to buy another board with CPU and RAM soldered on it for about the same price as the entire thing with the case.
This Framework Desktop computer can be repaired just like most laptops with soldered RAM by replacing the entire motherboard with CPU and RAM. Why would I downgrade the desktop PC's repairability down to that of a laptop? The tradeoff isn't worth it for that price.
It is indeed better than the Mac. It's still 1000 times worse than a regular desktop PC which lets people swap RAM modules, the CPU, add a dGPU and so on.
Every time I consider one of your laptops, I see that there are no options for dedicated page up, page down, home, and end keys and those are deal breakers for me. I always end up with a Lenovo instead.
Would you consider adding keyboard options that include these keys?
FWIW I have a Framework 16, and the keyboards run QMK, so are reprogrammable. I have those keys at the top row of my macropad. They don't have labels and are in kind of a weird place, but probably not less weird than an average laptop.
Thanks for the answers. I prepurchased one now out of FOMO, though I'm still trying to figure out if I need to cancel the order or if I can trust that I'll actually be able to run stuff on it.
Regarding LLMs, am I going to be able to run quantized models? Doesn't have to support all quantization methods, but at least one of the popular quantization methods would need to work (e.g. GGUF or EXL2). I ask this because quantized models provide the most "bang for buck" in LLMs.
Regarding image generation, in real workflows there is typically a lot of dependencies (much more than in LLMs, and much more than in toy examples for image generation). I'm wondering how many of these dependencies will in practice be limited to NVIDIA and CUDA. For example, if you grab some popular ComfyUI Flux workflow from Reddit, are you able to actually run that on Framework Desktop?
Thank you for releasing an update to the Framework 13! I have an original 11th-gen Intel w/ Xe, and I'm now ready to upgrade (esp. the graphics). Stoked I'm still supported! Gonna grab a new screen, a new keyboard, and a new Ryzen!
Qubes OS doesn't run on any "fully capable x86 desktop".
It's based on Xen and hardware virtualization. There are very few desktop computers recommended to run Qubes [0]. Does Framework support suspend on Qubes? If it works, it could become popular in the Qubes Community.
I know a core developer (Marek) recently got a Framework 16 and submitted some fixes after early testing iirc - might be worthwhile chasing it with him
I'm pretty torn when to self-host AI 70 B models. The market seems to be evolving fast. Outside of Apple, this is the first product to really compete in this category Self-host AI. So... I think a second generation will be significantly better than what's currently on offer today. Rationale below...
For a max spec processor with ram at $2,000, this seems like a decent deal given today's market. However, this might age very fast for three reasons.
Reason 1: LPDDR6 may debut in the next year or two this could bring massive improvements to memory bandwidth and capacity for soldered on memory.
LPDDR6 vs LPDDR5 - Data bus width - 24 bits, 16 bits Burst length - 24 bits, 15 bits Memory bandwidth - Up to 38.4 GB/s, Up to 6.7 GB/s
- Camm ram may or may not be maintain signal integrity as memory bandwidth increases. Until I see it implemented for a AI use-case in a cost-effective manner, I am skeptical.
Reason 2: - It's a laptop chip with limited PCI lanes and reduced power envelope. Theoretically, a desktop chip could have better performance, more lanes, socketable (Although, I don't think I've seen a socketed CPU with soldered RAM)
Reason 3: In addition, what does hardware look like being repurposed in the future compared to alternatives?
- Unlike desktop or server counterparts which can have a higher cpu core count, PCEe/IO Expansion, this processor with its motherboard is limited on re-purposing later down the line as a server to self-host other software besides AI. I suppose could be turned into a overkill, NAS with ZFS and HBA Single Controller Card in new case.
- Buying into the framework desktop is pretty limited based on the form factor. Next generation might be able to include a 16x slot fully populated, a 10G nic. That seems about it if they're going to maintain the backward compatibility philosophy given the case form factor.
Framework’s current policy in Asia—limiting deliveries solely to Taiwan—warrants reconsideration. Due to these restrictions, I had no choice but to purchase Apple products instead. To prevent further customer dissatisfaction, Framework should re-evaluate its shipping policies.
I understand that Framework’s logistics cannot match those of major retailers like Amazon or AliExpress. However, many customers rely on freight forwarders to access products from other countries. It is deeply disappointing that Framework does not allow shipments to these intermediaries, as they are a common and well-established workaround for limited international shipping. Given the widespread use of such services, excluding them seems unjustified.
That sounds misleading. The parent comment says all deliveries in Asia are limited to Taiwan. As far as I'm aware, export restrictions are only placed on certain chips going to China.
How do export restrictions prevent Framework from shipping to i.e Japan?
In the case of Japan, it's likely an issue with Japanese regulations.
We have a very strict radio law that applies to anything that can produce radio or em waves
That includes motherboards, since they can technically emit on those frequencies.
From what I have seen, the framework laptop motherboards appear to abide by that law. However, I assume it's just expensive to figure out in the first place.
LTT video specifically states that they were also able to get the Desktop model to be compliant with the (US, I suppose) EMI laws. He also shows the shielded side of the case (only one side is shielded and that was supposedly enough to pass).
Nothing about the current regime projects stability. Taiwan is a strategic partner and the source of many parts, so it’s essentially the only “safe bet” in Asia.
When you’re a company who needs time to adapt to any change in policy (aka all of them) and a company that can’t afford fines for noncompliance (small companies like Framework) your strategy is to be as conservative as possible.
Well, they also manufacture in Taiwan. Their office was around the corner from my restaurant here, and their staff would come in frequently. When I pre-ordered a framework 13 AMD I still lived in the USA and was waitlisted. Ages later I needed my shipping address in Taiwan and they had to completely change a bunch of stuff to make it work. Initially they wanted to put me back on a waitlist but I basically begged and they made it happen. So I guess they maintain two different warehousing and logistics operations between the two countries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are now in line.
Thank you for your patience.
Your estimated wait time is 7 minutes.
We are experiencing a high volume of traffic and using a virtual queue to limit
the amount of users on the website at the same time. This will ensure you have
the best possible online experience.
What the hell, Cloudflare? CDN with a wait time, really?
Lol - it's not that Cloudflare can't handle the traffic. It's the _framework_ can't handle the traffic and set up Cloudflare to ratelimit entry using their Waiting Room[0] product.
Clearly poorly messaged if it made you think it was a Cloudflare capacity issue!
WTF indeed, Framework. The whole point of a CDN is to keep your website operational when the number of visits scale up. A "waiting room" might as well be a 404.
That would be a sensible place to use a queue, too bad it's not constrained to there. I'm not familiar with how granular the CloudFlare feature is - could they have enabled it only for a portion of their site like https://frame.work/marketplace?
Otherwise, could be a good reason to use subdomains when architecting sites, say shop.framework.com.
This is weird. You can’t handle the load of a planned announcement on your landing page, in 2025? Something tells me their CTO role could use a new hire.
Not when every second line of code in the framework (haha) used really boils down to 250 calls and abstractions, when most of it is probably just strcpy()
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.
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.
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.
Why on earth would someone buy this instead of a regular PC setup, especially at that price point? There's no way I would pay that sort of money and not be able to change out the GPU and RAM, and also only have a single PCIE 4x slot.
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
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.
I wisth the 12" wouldn't have a garbage screen - although I'm hopeful for more options later on. This format would be equally if not more useful for gaming/business use case, I wonder why they start at the entry level.
The 400 nits mainly (looked dim in the presentation even), no high refresh rate, 1440p would have been nice. Unrealted but also only Intel options in 2025?
I wish there were any chance in hell that they could turn a profit on a blade server model. I kinda want a backplane with a dozen Framework motherboards plugged into it.
That ITX board looks like it's a stone's throw away.
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.
Sad that Framework laptops are still not available in Northern Europe, but I guess having regulation that makes new and small players unfeasible is important for some reason.
RIP Norway (where I am). I thought it was all of Northern Europe. Most keyboards for Norway are the same as Swedish and Danish. Maybe I can do a gray import from Denmark or Sweden.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
I've been building mini ITX systems since 2013, trying to accomplish what they've done. It's a kickass form factor. All in one systems like this are wicked, and they've pushed for modularity too, which is the reason to do this rather than a laptop or enterprise product (not Framework laptops tho, which is their draw too). Very excited.
The Ryzen APU could be interesting for running local AI models and with 128 GB of RAM you can fit quite a large model. Plus it should be relatively energy efficient compared to a full size desktop build with separate GPU. Lack of PCIe 5.0 is a bit of a bummer as you could otherwise plug in some new Samsung 9100 Pro NVMe drives.
Would love to see how it performs. It supposedly has a memory bandwidth of 256 GB/sec which is about similar to a Threadripper Pro 7965WX with 8 memory channels. A Mac Studio M2 Ultra has 800 GB/sec of bandwidth though (which is RTX4080/RTX5080 territory) but is also about 2-3x more expensive at 128 GB of memory, not to mention the cost of upgrading internal storage.
They should work just fine, sure peak bandwidth will be limited, but most workloads are not bottlenecked by I/O bandwidth on PCIe 4, but are limited by IOPs which should be decent on the 9100.
Tangentially related but what does a “Radeon 8060S” mean? I’m so confused what the memory bandwidth is and how much VRAM (I think it’s shared?). I was gonna buy a M2 studio for local LLM but this seems like a good choice. But I can’t figure out what the token/s would be like. I have Qwen2.5 3B running on a Mac mini M1 and it’s not great. Slow and gets stuff wrong. If I can get the 14B running with a response time below 3 seconds for Home Assistant, it would be perfect.
Edit: found it, 256 GB/s for the shared memory bandwidth
Cool but this shows off the absolute pointlessness of the Framework concept - when you have RAM, CPU and GPU integrated, you essentially have something as modular as a modern Mac, which goes against any idea of modularity.
This has been the future for more than a decade, evidenced by stuff like smartphones and games consoles, and as far as I know, Nvidia is also working on their SoC, and so does Intel (which I think was the whole point of their gaming GPU push).
How can you say that when a laptop (let’s agree to focus on the FW laptops for now) has so many other components beyond the SoC/mainboard?
Even ignoring the fact that the FW 13 and FW 16 have socketed/upgradable RAM, you’ve got the chassis, the screen, the wireless card, storage, the keyboard, and more.
If you had bought the FW 13 upon release (in 2021, I think), you have already had several opportunities to upgrade the guts of the computer while keeping everything else the same. If my CPU is no longer suitable for my needs, then why should I have to also replace my display? If it were a desktop computer, that’d obviously be preposterous. And FW has made products that make it preposterous for laptops too.
On the whole, I think you may be confusing the goals of repairability and upgradability with the notion of modularity. They’re not wholly unrelated of course, but they are different, and I think it’s clear that FW accomplishes those goals.
Currently, I'm using generative AI of various kinds on my M1 Air (llm, image gen, TTS, STT), but am frustrated by the limitations - primarily memory and secondarily availability of an MLX adaptation.
Just an AI hobbyist, so I don't have time or inclination to tweak everything. Given the non-NVIDIA GPU, how painful will it be to play around with new AI models on this system?
Bit of an odd one really, they've introduced modularity and customisation to the laptop market where there wasn't any.
But they have now introduced reduced modularity and customisation in comparison with what's available in the desktop market. CPU is soldered, RAM Is soldered and the GPU is soldered.
This desktop will be perfect for me, as well as 12" lappie... Give me 128Gb of ram with good number of processor cores that is not $5K or so. I am already moving towards Linux, this will be the moment.
I was looking from GMKTex and Beelink to have at least 64Gb, but this is fantastic deal and I can't wait for it.
Happy to see them announce the new AMD chips in the 13", but the prices are a little nuts compared to what you can get elsewhere.
I bet the desktop is interesting, but first I was in a 30m waiting room to access their website (what?!?) and then the button to pre order the desktop is broken. Ouch.
I was actually looking at getting a 395 Max with that 8060s iGPU and looking for mini-PCs or motherboards. This should make a killer console replacement with Bazzite (once they sort out the minor niggles that come with the new chipset).
I got a job some time back, at the interview they asked where I got tech news. I said ARS Technica, and they looked at me like I'd sprouted another head.
They fired me a few weeks in, but then went out of business.
So cool for LLM inference, wish they had the cajones to ship some soldered lpddr in a laptop form factory for the bandwidth, but i guess ill have to wait for the lpcamm generation to arrive
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 they try to pitch as a gaming machine—when their laptop fundamentals are still admittedly shaky, and the gaming market still doesn't seem to care for or about them very much at all—just keeps eroding the confidence that this is going to work out in the end.
> 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.
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
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)."
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
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.
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.
if you're in the Local LLMs world this is an interesting choice. All they care about is lots of fast RAM. 128GB at $2k is a good price when compared to Mac Studios
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.
I like the case. Nice and compact, and the swappable tiles are cute. If the case works well with non-Framework Mini-ITX motherboards I'd be tempted to pick one up.
The innards, however, are disappointing:
- I get the explanation for why soldered RAM was necessary, but that's still pretty darn close to a dealbreaker for me; I'm inclined to wait for a future motherboard revision without that limitation
- Only two Expansion Cards is vastly fewer than what I'd expect from a "Framework Desktop"
- The lack of a dGPU is unfortunate for a desktop
If I were to design a Framework Desktop, I'd replace the entire rear panel with nothing but Expansion Card slots. Literally as many as will fit; fucking fill it to the goddamn brim. And then throw in some USB4 headers to connect to even more Expansion Card slots on the front. I want a terrifyingly large number of Expansion Cards. More Type-C ports than any computer has any business having, and then even more. I don't just want people questioning my sanity; I want it to be known, plain as day, that I have gone certifiably batfuck insane.
I'd also expose the same Expansion Bay interface as the Framework 16, and offer a desktop-grade GPU in that form factor (presumably too thick and power-hungry for a laptop, but if a Framework 16 owner wants a laptop with a dummy thicc dumptruck of an ass and 30 minutes of battery life, then who am I to judge?).
And air-cooling? So 20th Century! Good opportunity as any to make liquid cooling a mainstream option.
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 a real shame the memory isn't a 512 bit bus or higher for comparable bandwidth to apple's M max series. If they had accomplished that at this price they would sell like crazy I think for AI. Having the downsides of soldered ram without the upsides of pushing it to a much higher bandwidth is a bummer. I assume that is on AMD though and not something Framework could control. Regardless happy to have more options. I really hope there are more options in the near future for integrated boards with a large variety of bandwidth choices and ram capacities.
Two other Framework announcements:
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-...
> ...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.
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?
There is security.
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.
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.
Why would you prefer AMD? price, heat/fan noise?
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 two CPU models are i3-1215U and i5-1334U [1] which are 15 W parts with 2 P cores. They should be OK.
[1] https://youtu.be/-lErGZZgUbY?t=729
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 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.
Thermal issues on a laptop I'd be pulling heatsinks and putting better paste on. Also a laptop cooler is nice unless you get junebugs.
Framework also mentioned they use PTM7950 in everything from now so repasting wont help if they didnt mess up assembly.
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.
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.
By the way, how do people carry those laptops on airplanes if regulations mandate that every radio equipment must be off?
Mandate is a strong word.
They don't. Only cellular connectivity. Most airlines even offer WiFi now
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.
Considering Intel's track record on hardware vulnerabilities, I'd much rather prefer AMD.
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.
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.
The desktop is fascinating if AMD can pull off Rocm this round. 128GB of unified memory for only $1,999, but you get an AMD GPU.
I have the framework 16, and ROCm has been driving me nuts. The GPU in the 16 isn’t as meant for AI, but just shockingly bad
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.
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.
For me as well, this sounds much more exciting.
A laptop tablet hybrid that I can actually repair would be great. Would use tablet mode for image editing and hand-written notes.
Same.
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).
I still think very fondly of my 11” MacBook Air. The idea of a 12” framework laptop is very appealing.
Same here. I'm still using my 11" MacBook because it is the only one that fits in my handbag :)
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...
What OS? My air can't upgrade and is out of space with like nothing installed. Curious if still macos or something else, now.
You can upgrade the disk of a MacBook Air with a larger SSD and install newer MacOS versions with https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/.
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.
The 12" form factor tho..
Unironically i went looking at 11” MacBook air listings on ebay earlier today.
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
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.
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.
what about the Snapdragon? Microsoft is using in their ARM laptops
Painfully encumbered with binary blobs and out of date drivers (that is, out of tree hacked in kernel drivers that will never be ported to mainline)
Linux support remains problematic.
> 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
Because AMD chips achieve ARM efficiency without dealing with ARM compatibility mess.
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.
> So they're exactly like the gaming PC community. "Decibels aren't a benchmark", as an enthusiast acquaintance says.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Snapdragon X series are far from ass. Most programs work. Even ancient stuff.
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.
You mean this?
https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard
no. that's a dev board with ~rasberry pi 3 performance.
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
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.
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.
Qualcomm doesn't belong in the list, Freedreno and Turnip are feature complete open source GPU drivers.
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.
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...
The problem is with ARM itself, who is trying to drown out the other licensees in the space, but then can't deliver a good enough product.
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.
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.
They briefly mentioned a new keyboard. I would really like QMK for my framework 13, but alas it was only available for the framework 16...
I wonder if the 12-inch form factor could be modified to support a 360 deg hinge? I enjoyed the Lenovo Yoga's tablet configuration.
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.
Good! Strange that their photos don't show this off. Lenovo ad-spend showcasing tablet mode was enormous.
https://frame.work/laptop12
This is the first time I’ve ever seen a CloudFlare “wait time” screen at “15 minutes”.
Looks like their entire website is behind a waiting room at the moment.
You’d think they could make their most popular pages static for now and serve them out of the CloudFlare cache, though.
Maybe they're outgrowing the free Cloudflare plan.
Was over an hour 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.
It is a 360 hinge.
Sorry, my mistake, as others have noted. I corrected my post.
I would love to see one of these hinges as a mod for the Framework 13...
The 12 inch is what I will be considering purchasing as I already have a 13 inch AMD that I am pretty happy with.
Would you mainly use the 12 inch one or you like having both?
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.
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.
Have you considered looking into a personal freight forwarder? I used these a few times while traveling through Europe.
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 looked into it, but Framework explicitly states that they will cancel orders to freight forwarding addresses.
I wish they let us get rid of the pointless speakers and get a few more whs of battery instead.
The 12-inch laptop might be interesting as a potential upgrade to my remarkable, with the obvious benefit of also being usable as a laptop.
I wonder how writing on the touch screen feels?
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.
Having seen how students treat school-provided Chromebooks, those IO modules will get lost and damaged at light speed.
I interpreted "students" to refer to university students. Seems more likely to be Framework's target audience.
Patel mentioned in the announcement presentation that the device was originally developed with a very clear focus on high school students.
They're locked in my an internal screw. So they'll at least last a few days.
They can get screwed down by an internal screw. They explained that for this specific use case in the linustechtips video.
That's what we call a canny business model!
The great thing about IO modules is that if they outer side is damaged you can just replace it
Here's hoping that touchscreen becomes available as a component for the 13 as well.
The 12 inch screen is a different aspect ratio so it would be unlikely.
Apparently it comes with an optional stylus, so there might indeed be a touchscreen there.
Their website was hugged to death, so I can't confirm.
Still no haptic trackpad!
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.
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.
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.
And here I sit, longing for the days when trackpads had separate, physical buttons underneath them.
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.
do people actually use their thumb to click ?? i always just used the other pointer
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.
Yet another 1080p garbage screen. Please! I had tablets with higher DPI 10 years ago!
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.
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.
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.
1920x1200 / 16:10. It's perfect for a 12" IMO.
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.
> Since when has DPI started _decreasing_ again?
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.
This is a ridiculous thing to respond to someone who complains that this hardware is worse than what was available at the same size 10 years ago.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Since when has DPI started _decreasing_ again?
Since the pandemic. I have a still functioning Galaxy S8 in my drawer, which shames modern phones with its 570ppi density.
Having to render all those pixels drained the battery faster, though. It was more practical to keep it at 1080p.
Which is exactly why they did do it and definitely do not continue releasing phones with 500ppi to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S22#Display
Yeah, Samsung likes to tout specs on their flagships, but they’ve also made the resolution user-adjustable (presumably not for no reason).
If you put the phone in battery saver mode, lowering resolution is one of the things it does.
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.
Which shows that you can get the best of both worlds, so it's possible to offer high res to the users that want it.
Only because of Samsung's VR headsets, it was ridiculous and useless otherwise.
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.
It's a downgrade in DPI compared to even the 16, let alone the 13. Does it at least correspond to a higher refresh rate like with the 16?
Hopefully that's upgradeable someday in any case.
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.)
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.
It is a weird product for the Framework brand.
The pitch for the Framework laptop is that it is repairable/upgradable/modular. Something that is uncommon for laptops nowadays.
This is the opposite. Desktops are modular by default, so much is that my computer is like the Ship of Theseus, I never changed it, but upgrade to upgrade, it is a completely different machine than it once was (it started off as a 486!). This one is not.
The Framework desktop doesn't look bad, but now, I am confused about the meaning of the brand. It is as if Tesla made a diesel car.
I agree. I was an early adopter and have a Framework 13 11th gen intel (batch 4) and have been generally happy with it. Except the keyboard stopped working and I had to replace it, ~100 tiny screws later (and one stripped screw). And the battery drains fast (~24 hours) when suspended. And except that it won't turn on anymore without plugging into a particular USB-C port with a "dumb" USB cable (the basic 5V 900mA type) even with a full battery charge. And there hasn't been a BIOS update for this mainboard since Sep 2022.
I understand that a new company with a new product is going to have issues. But I would have strongly preferred they spent the time and effort (and money) fixing or replacing these 1st gen mainboards rather than branching out into a very non-Framework area like desktop gaming PCs.
In case it helps someone: my Framework had rapid battery drain in suspend. Around 10% per hour.
Turns out the Samsung EVO NVMe I installed had really high power draw (I guess it's meant for performance desktops?). I replaced it with a WD Blue and now I lose negligible power while suspended.
Mine shipped with a WD Black, so I'm not hopeful but it's worth considering, if I end up sticking with this hardware.
You could try pulling the drive and then leave it suspended for a day as a test.
Curious if you're running Linux, I recall seeing a discussion about there being a bug with that on Framework that causes it to not suspend properly and burn energy.
> I would have strongly preferred they spent the time and effort (and money) fixing or replacing these 1st gen mainboards
Sadly this does not generate revenue to the shareholders.
I had that issue on my batch 5 11th gen. There's an issue with the rechargeable CMOS battery they included (that isn't present on the later 12th and 13th gen) that when it stops taking a charge your laptop stops turning on unless you do some arcane process to reset it.
They provide a "repair" kit that's basically a dummy CMOS battery that hooks in to the normal power system that prevents the issue from occurring again.
Also just FYI, there was a BIOS update in June of last year (3.20).
>There's an issue with the rechargeable CMOS battery
I am aware of the issue as described in [1] and the fix in [2]. However, my support request has gone unanswered for a year, as was my second support request. In addition, I have doubts as to whether this fix (which requires soldering!) will work.
I was not aware of an updated BIOS [3], foolishly believing the output of 'fwupdmgr' after following the instructions in [4]. It looks like I'll need to find a USB stick and update via EFI shell. Thanks for the tip!
But still, I think they should do more for early customers before expanding out well beyond their core market!
1 - https://framework.kustomer.help/my-laptop-is-not-powering-on...
2 - https://guides.frame.work/Guide/RTC+Battery+Substitution+on+...
3 - https://community.frame.work/t/11th-gen-intel-core-bios-3-20...
4 - https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/updating-bios-on-linu...
Just so you know I did the soldering fix and its been working just fine for me, for w/e that's worth to you.
Also you're welcome! They have been pretty hit or miss on pushing updates to LVFS so I absolutely understand why you might not have known.
Thanks. I submitted another support request, and this time got a form email back. I will quote it here in full. Let me say that I am deeply unimpressed. They require that I disassemble the laptop to take a photograph of the mainboard, and send it to them (somehow, they do not say) and then perform major surgery on the mainboard that THEY designed poorly. What's more, they say that YOU have all liability for the repair and its consequences. How is this acceptable? What happened to a manufacturer sending an RMA and a box and repairing the mistake that they made? Is THIS what we sign up for when we support "repairable" computers, that we should expect to have to solder our own motherboards when they are poorly designed? And that they require a photograph of the mainboard (which requires disassembly) is icing on the cake.
I truly regret my purchase of a Framework laptop. Truth be told, I've never, ever had to repair a laptop more than this one, and I'd prefer a product that I didn't have to repair at all (and if there is a defect in manufacture or design, that the manufacturer take all necessary steps to remedy that error). If I was attracted to their products, including their desktop offering, I would think twice before spending money with them. I really really wish I'd put the money toward a new M-series macbook.
Heck their reminder to keep the BIOS updated makes no mention of the fact that their instructions for Linux are bogus, as their UEFI blobs are not available to fwupdmgr. What's more, to get to 3.20 you have to first upgrade to 3.17, all through EFI boot. It's a really rotten experience.
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PLEASE READ THIS MESSAGE FULLY!
This is an automated message sent to all customers that have either been identified as having a power-related issue with an 11th Gen Intel Core Mainboard or have specifically requested either a replacement RTC Battery or the solderable RTC Battery Substitute.
If you’ve needed to perform the Mainboard Reset procedure more than once on your 11th Gen system or the laptop will not power on even after performing the reset, your RTC/CMOS battery may no longer be holding a charge. There are a couple options available that the Framework Support team can provide to resolve the issue:
1. Framework Support can provide a replacement RTC/CMOS battery to you, free of charge, regardless of the status of your warranty. Simply request this option and provide your Framework Order Number along with a clear image/photo of the serial number of your Mainboard. If you do not have access to the Order Number, please provide the email used to complete the purchase on the Framework website. To access the Mainboard serial number, please follow the steps in the guide HERE and find the serial label between the memory slots. Also, please verify your shipping information/address (only in supported countries/regions) to avoid unnecessary back and forth communications. For information on acceptable shipping addresses, please see the following article HERE . If you receive a replacement RTC/CMOS battery it is important to make sure to let it fully recharge by keeping your laptop plugged into power for at least 24 hours. We also recommend keeping your laptop plugged into power during long periods of non-use to avoid letting the RTC/CMOS battery fully discharge. Note that even a normal 5V/900mA USB-C power adapter will sufficiently trickle charge the system and RTC/CMOS battery.
2. Framework Support now has an alternative option for those with the technical skills to solder electrical components. This alternative RTC/CMOS Battery Substitution is a single solder point component which replaces the coin cell battery with a circuit that keeps the RTC subsystem powered from the main battery. You can find the step by step instructions for installing this module in this guide. PLEASE NOTE: You should NOT request this option if you or the person designated for this rework do not have sufficient electronics soldering experience. While it is only a single solder point, failing to solder this correctly can result in damage to the system that is not covered under Framework’s Limited Warranty. If you accept the associated liability, please request this option and provide a clear image/photo of the serial number of your mainboard and your Framework Order Number. If you do not have access to the Order Number, please provide the email used to complete the purchase on the Framework website. To access the Mainboard serial number, please follow the steps in the guide HERE and find the serial label between the memory slots. Also, please verify your shipping information/address (only in supported countries/regions) to avoid unnecessary back and forth communications. For information on acceptable shipping addresses, please see the following article HERE .
Finally, we also recommend keeping your system up to date with the latest firmware releases. Please see the following knowledge base article which has links to the latest BIOS/Firmware and Framework Driver Bundles for each generation of Framework Laptop.
If you have provided the required imagery and your order number, one of our staff will be with you to provide an update on your request. Thank you for your patience and we apologize for any frustration this issue may have caused. Regards, Framework Support
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I got the same email, and I agree they should've taken responsibility for their obvious design flaw and fixed it themselves free of charge.
Also I will again agree that my Batch 4 (or was it 5? I can't remember) FW13 is the most I've had to repair a laptop as well. I'm just gonna chalk that up to them technically being pre-full-production units and hope they have improved their QA in the later gens.
However I will also add that I like having the option to fix it myself (which is something I have some amount of skill/enjoyment in doing) which is certainly NOT an option you'd have with that M-series MacBook (or really any other brand of laptop)
I was also an early adopter (batch 2) I ended up buying a m2 macbook air to replace it because the thing overheated and down clocked to 200Mhz (yes megahertz, not gigahertz) constantly and it was unusable. It sits around unused, I can't even give it away to family because I don't want to hear complaints about it being unusable. I just don't trust framework to not have issues.
I know very few people that do anything other than upgrade their GPU or SSD during the entire lifespan of their computer. Maybe when I was younger I'd upgrade the RAM after saving up, but am fortunate enough now to be able to buy what I want up front.
This product is for me.
A few years ago I tried to repurpose a desktop with a bad motherboard, but it was impossible to find a replacement for the 7-year-old CPU. eBay prices were more than the original MSRP, and at that point it was cheaper to buy new parts for the oldest still-selling generation.
I'm already replacing everything except the SSD and GPU with every upgrade anyway, now it will just be the SSD but I can keep the case.
Something I've noticed over the years is that a lot of PC enthusiast discussion seems to be self-selecting for those most likely to chase the latest hardware, which affects how they think and talk about future proofing or upgrade ability. The challenge with x86 PC is that because the platform is so flexible it casts the widest net over huge amounts of use cases and circumstances. The example that comes to mind is criticism over intel vs AMD chipsets/sockets with longer compatibility, but it comes down to what your demands are plus where you buy in the cycle of other components (DDR4 vs DDR5) and needed support. There are trade-offs everywhere.
Definitely. My last self built desktop ($8k total in 2012-ish) lasted a decade under heavy use like M/ECAD and compiling stuff, with only a midlife upgrade from SSD to NVME. When you buy top of the line cutting edge parts that are binned for overclocking, they remain competitive for a very long time, especially now that we’ve hit diminishing returns. Now all you need to make sure is that it’s got enough PCIe lanes if going to a performance build. I only retired the desktop because of how much power it burns and our electricity rates going up here in SoCal.
That 64gb OCed 3200 (maybe 3500) mHz DDR3 RAM for example, kept up with DDR4 speeds for most of that decade when I benchmarked every few years. Intel extreme processor, workstation motherboard, and GTX Titans also kept chugging along. I’ve been looking at some of the higher end DDR5 coming down the pipeline and those are also likely to be on the higher end of performance for a decade while the consumer parts catch up. The only problem is that the workstation motherboard market seems to have disappeared.
(This was a work computer for my consulting)
SFFs and laptops share many parts, and of course the new mini desktop has 2 of the framework compatible bays for your choice of usb/network/audio that should work today and be able to be upgraded later.
I don't do much computing on the move, that my phone can't handle. But a desktop (that generally lasts twice as long as a laptop and costs half as much) is pretty interesting to me.
Also keep in mind that framework sold a small chassis compatible with their laptop boards, so if you upgrade your laptop main board you could rehost the old one in a small desktop chassis.
Seems like a natural expansion for framework and might well get them more customers and more sales per customer.
> I never changed it, but upgrade to upgrade, it is a completely different machine than it once was (it started off as a 486!)
Nit: You can believe that story, but there's zero chance that at some point you didn't upgrade the case, motherboard, CPU and RAM possibly at the same time. If you replace 90% of what makes a computer, does it make sense to say you "never changed" it? At what point do you consider it "changed"?
This Framework desktop also lets you swap motherboard, CPU and RAM in one go, why does it not fit your definition?
Hence The Ship of Theseus comment
The difference is that The Ship of Theseus had all its parts replaced one by one, in a long period of time. If you replace 90% of the ship at the same time (RAM, CPU and Motherboard), then the analogy breaks down.
It's a perfectly understandable analogy unless you nitpick for no reason.
I didn't say it's not understandable, just that it breaks down - i.e. doesn't apply anymore.
The point of an analogy is to point out how our intuition tells us it's the same boat, despite having no parts in common with the initial boat.
As other comment mentioned, if you keep the sails and rebuild a new boat around it, no person in their right mind would feel that it's the same boat. It's very clearly a new boat, and the analogy breaks down.
If you kept the sails and rebuilt the boat around them, does it make sense to say it's the same boat?
That's why I said "you can believe your story" while I pointed out it's a very unlikely one.
I agree. There's a lot of options for very small PC cases that will fit a dedicated GPU and regular itx components (I'm running a midori 5L system, it's great, don't ignore the instruction to use loctite on the bolts you will have pain) - I don't think the desktop market needs this the same way the laptop market needed the earlier framework devices.
It's still a modular computer, just not a laptop. It's more like if Tesla made an electric scooter
The soldered RAM is surprising for Framework, and doubly surprising for being so in a form-factor that usually doesn't have soldered RAM.
Similar to what other commenters have expressed, it just seems like they shouldn't have built this product if they couldn't figure out the soldered RAM bit.
That is not a framework choice, that is an AMD architecture that doesn't use regular RAM modules as it requires wider data bus
The statement above is that one would expect Framework to have chosen a platform which does not require soldered RAM, not that Framework kept such an option by choosing this AMD part.
All that aside, I absolutely can't wait for desktops to decide to go the same route of having 4 memory channels instead of 2. Right now the only way to have >2 channels is to buy workstation/server class stuff or an APU.
Sadly there's no alternative if you want 256 bits wide at the moment. Well a previous generation threadripper with a huge increase in power consumption and requiring a discrete GPU.
BTW, careful with "channels". Todays normal desktops and laptops (besides the strix halo and apple pro/max/ultra) are 128 bits wide. But in the DDR4 -> DDR5 transition they doubled the number of channels to 4. However the strix halo biggest advantage is the extra memory bandwidth going from 128 bits wide to 256 bits wide.
Finally the technology of the ps5 and XboxX comes to laptops, tablets, and small desktops.
From their LTT video, it looked like they chose to do Desktop because of the AMD platform (and not the either way around, where they planned a desktop product and then chose AMD strix halo). Apparently setting up the manufacturing pipeline for laptops built on strix halo is expensive as of now and there are only two laptops in the whole market using it. So Frame.work choose to go the desktop route to save on cost while still making the platform available for everyone.
But think of it this way, anybody who specifically wants this chip (Ryzen strix halo) now has a way to buy it in a somewhat modular platform.
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The architecture was their choice. It's completely possible to build a PC with that form factor which does not have soldered RAM, so it's strange that they went with it. Their brand with laptops is supposed to be 'more repairable' but they've chosen to make a desktop PC that's less repairable than their laptops are? It doesn't make any sense with the rest of their lineup. The person who would want this product is the opposite of the person who would want their other products.
That market, "repairable modular desktops", is extremely saturated. This only exists because nobody was putting the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 in anything, so they got gifted the entire market of "GPUs with more than 32gb of RAM that aren't Apple." And then a desktop because fitting this in a laptop is hard (hence why nobody else is doing it, either)
> This only exists because nobody was putting the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 in anything... And then a desktop because fitting this in a laptop is hard (hence why nobody else is doing it, either)
The Ryzen AI Max+ 395 was paper launched a month ago. What Framework announced here is just another pre-order (even batch 1 won't ship until Q3). There are dozens of other systems, including mini-PCs, announced months ago which are set to launch before this. Small laptops were actually the first 395+ products to launch, hence this month's benchmark reviews all used them. E.g. https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/laptops/gaming-laptops/a...
I would not be surprised if one will be able to get a full 128 GB 395+ mini PC for less than the cost of the Framework Desktop baseboard before the Framework Desktop actually starts arriving in hands. What you're buying here is a premium to be able to replace the shell and front USB ports.
Where can I find those mini-PCs? The HP Z2 Mini G1a is "Coming Soon". If this is to be believed: "2025年5月以降販売開始予定", which translate to "Sales scheduled to start after May 2025" That is Q2 2025 - at the earliest.
I haven't found any other with a committed release/ship date.
This Reddit thread tends to agree: https://www.reddit.com/r/MiniPCs/comments/1ieiate/when_are_r...
Even the Asus Z13 laptops with the 395+ have no shipping date yet.
Looking at the two GMKtec systems with their rattling fans I have here, I would rather take the Framework system where I can easily swap the fan. Cooling those 100-120W will take space and air flow.
They were announced months ago, not shipping months ago. Framework announce Q1 and is shipping Q3. Again, keep in mind the CPU itself only launched last month. This is the real reason the 395 had not been put in anything yet.
Plenty of folks on Reddit have already received shipment (not order) confirmation of the Z13. It looks like even more as of this morning. I doubt if any have actually fully received said shipments yet as it has only been a couple days since launch. It'll likely remain pretty out of stock unless you managed to get an order immediately at launch, again due to the paper launch of the 395 last month and low 395 availability until Q2.
I didn't know HP was making one too! That'll be exciting as it's easier to order that at my work than e.g. an ASUS one or what have you.
This almost definitely did not happen.
Yes it's possible, but at the cost of 2-3x less memory bandwidth, which is a key feature to provide GPU and large language model performance.
> The person who would want this product is the opposite of the person who would want their other products.
That's me! I'm that person! \o/
I don't know anything about RAMs or their bus size. Is this something that will be "fixed" in the future, idk, with DDR6? Meaning we can have replacable RAM with such bus.
Problem is there is no socket available for thin/light/low power CPUs to have a 256 bit wide bus.
So to ensure 256 bits @ 8000 MHz works well AMD did it in the same package. In theory they could A) ship a halo without ram B) design a new socket, C) allow motherboard makers to pick 2 x CUDIMMs or 4x DDR5 dimms. Not sure that would buy them much market though.
As apple and others have proved, not many care about replaceable dimms, especially if it gives them 2-3x the performance and/or better perf/watt.
Apparently not. In Linus Tech Tips latest video, the Framework CEO says they talked to AMD about it and that one of their engineers ran some simulations and found the stability would degrade too far for it to be possible.
This is getting down to speed of light and the distance to the ram. The RAM needs to be very close to the chip.
This is also being seen in the X3D CPU's where the memory is stacked on top to reduce latency and as density was maxed in 2d space.
There isn't any standard to put that kind of RAM on DIMM-like slots.
Honestly... I wonder why they didn't consider CAMM2? The bandwidth and signal integrity rivals that of soldiered memory. They could have had the best of both worlds, really.
AFAIK you would need 4 CAMM modules for that kind of bandwidth, good luck stuffing that onto a board at all, let alone for a reasonable price
A single LPCAMM2 module is supposed to be all the RAM for a laptop, so it’s 128 bit wide. You’d need two LPCAMM for this, not four. And they are currently available in 32G and 64G varieties ($180/$330). So they aren’t absurdly priced, if they were in stock.
For dual channel 256-bit wide LPDDR5X, you would definitely need 4 CAMM modules
It’s also not that absurd pricing of the modules themselves but of the R&D effort to cram 4 CAMMs onto a board with sufficient signal integrity
“Dual channel” is not a thing with CAMM. CAMM is 128 bits wide. To feed a 256bit wide memory controller, you need 2 CAMM modules. LPCAMM2 uses 4 memory packages. The observed number of packages next to the APU on this is 8. So you need 2 modules.
CAMM, unlike DIMM, is designed to be amenable to stacking from the get go.
They went for local LLM route and for that high-bandwidth memory is a must.
Consider it a low-price alternative to mac mini or nvidia’s box.
This can also be chained though not as effectively as macs for example (those have thunderbolt for interconnect)
> low-price alternative to mac mini
This starts at 1099$ per the article, so the mac mini is the low-price alternative here.
This starts with 32GB of RAM, so no the mac mini isn't the low priced alternative at that point.
Also fully spec'd at 128gb is $2000, which only gets you a 64gb mac mini
The max config with 128gb ram is half the price of mac and 8tb ssd is 800 and not 2000
If you can find me a Mac Mini with 32GB of RAM I'd love to see it.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini/apple-m4-chip-wi...
Select 32
It's not exactly an out of the park win though as it's only $100-$200 cheaper and it trends poorly the farther from comparing base models you go (particularly after 64 GB, for which you need to leave the Mini family for the Studio). By the time you get to 128 GB, which you'd want for the 70B class AI models, you end up back at the original statement.
Huh. Ate my words then. I briefly checked Apple's page and didn't see them.
However those are the base M4 chip and not the M4 Pro. You need the M4 Pro to get competitive in GPU compute numbers for a more like to like comparison. The M4 Pro mini comes out at $1800 with the 48GB option, or $2000 for 64GB. For the same price the Framework machine gets you 128GB.
I think you're probably right comparing to the M4 Pro would make more sense but keep in mind you don't really need much compute, it's just that the M4 Pro has memory bandwidth more similar to the AI Max 395+ while the "normal" M4 doesn't.
Every large AI model is heavy memory bandwidth constrained to the point my 9800X3D (with the extra L3 cache) and 128 GB/s memory attached is only 60% utilized running a 32 GB model in CPU only mode (no NPU, iGPU, or GPU offload enabled). Really small AI models can start to be compute bound but, at that point, you don't really need the 32 GB of memory anymore and probably just want a normal GPU.
Apparently this is due to signal integrity. AMD says swappable RAM is not possible. Source: LinusTechTips video.
I saw that, and I'm curious if that's a death-knell for LPCAMM ram. My understanding was that the entire point of that new standard was to allow for the higher ram speeds and lower latencies etc that you would normally get with soldered ram, but in a modular, swappable package.
If LPCAMM already can't keep up with requirements when it is barely even out, then my guess is it won't fare well going forward.
So 1 of 2 things is probably true:
AMD is not being completely truthful with their statements that LPCAMM wasn't able to work (maybe it was just more difficult/complicated than they were willing to do, but it could work or
latency/speed requirements have already outpaced what LPCAMM can provide and soldered ram is the future.
I really hope it's the former, but it wouldn't be the first time something like the second has occurred. Apparently cache also used to be a separate, swappable component before it became integrated into the die. RAM might end up going the same way.
The non-MAX Ryzen laptops also announced today actually use socketed RAM.
I guess they'd claim it is only the MAX AMD procs which force soldered RAM, but since they could as well have used a non-MAX chip (and correspondingly reduce the price) this just shows how much of this is an arbitrary, and therefore questionable, decision from Framework rather than any restriction AMD sets.
Yes, those are the ones with a 128 bit memory bus that can reuse designs from previous generations. Nearly every laptop and desktop has has 128 bit memory for the last few decades, the strix halo is the first with 256 bit wide x86 targeted at tablets, laptops, and SFFs. Much like the m1/m2/m4 pro. The M3 pro for some reason decided on 192 bits wide.
Yes, and they have less BW than this solution.
Yeah, in LTT video they are talking with the CEO https://youtu.be/-lErGZZgUbY?t=447
Apparently LPCAMM2 (brand new upgradable RAM) modules wont support 256 bits width soon.
I don’t think I’ve upgraded a desktop machine for about 10 years. I usually buy a 1-3 year old corporate desktop and use it for 2-4 years, buy another one and throw the old one on eBay.
I’m on a 10500 based Lenovo thing at the moment.
My needs are not immense though.
They seem to be partnering with AMD and AMD has this new nice chip, they couldn't get it into a laptop, so they made a quick desktop.
It seems more like a way to launch a mini-desktop. They can later offer alternative mainboards that fit in that desktop (or anyother).
Yes, its a strange first product, but I think its mostly because they wanted to be early with releasing this AMD chip. Seems to me AMD was looking for partners to push this chip out for 'AI'.
It seems that Framework desktop is less modular than regular desktops.
Full size sure, but we already have that, so it doesn't matter
In SFF land?, maybe, but that's already a lot closer to laptops, which is where I expect this to loop back into regular Framework lineup
I think it's an offering for companies that would like to get onboard with Framework but would prefer to only have one contract / contact for their laptops and desktops.
I feel like the target audience would build (or buy used/build used) something cheaper that's more powerful.
The form factor isn't small enough to make this worth it IMO
The reason is simple. They're making it for the same reason that Porsche started making SUVs.
Stories sell.
It seems unframeworky
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.
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.
You just need to use two CAMM2 to get 256-bit bus, just like what you do with regular DIMMs when you need more channels.
Apparently that AMD CPU isnt even compatible with CAMM2 because of technical reasons. Framework CEO explained it in LinusTechTips video.
It's on package memory that AMD sells bundled to OEMs.
Strix Halo doesn't have on package memory, are you thinking of Intel's Lunar Lake?
https://youtu.be/-lErGZZgUbY
The ceo kind of explains why in this video. In essence it seems to be a limitation of the chip from AMD
Yep. They could've had socketed RAM but they wouldn't have gotten the same bandwidth and that's really important for running things like LLMs.
> really important for running things like LLMs
and games, having really speedy/low latency memory helps a lot with being competitive to some mid range dedicated GPUs
Bandwidth to a GPU from a socketed RAM? How?
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.
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.
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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.
> So don't make it then?
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.
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.
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
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".
you're right, it is just one component, but please tell me, how many computers have you used that have no RAM?
What does "having no RAM" have to do with it"
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.
> Is one a lot?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Compared to the most popular alternative (mac mini / mac studio), it's still way more inline with the framework mission.
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 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
"Details of Framework’s Environmental Ethos and Long Term Mission": https://knowledgebase.frame.work/details-of-framework-s-envi...
> 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.
> RAM upgrades at reasonable prices…
The RAM is not upgradable.
Parent clearly means upgrade at time-of-purchase.
FTA:
> Because the memory is non-upgradeable, we’re being deliberate in making memory pricing more reasonable than you might find with other brands.
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.
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.
They saw an underserved niche and went for it. Based on the wait time for their site seems to be working for them.
They just got me as a new customer with this AI miniPC. It's the first Framework product I've bought.
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.
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.
It's not for you then
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.
From 7:40~ "The signal integrity doesn't work out."
I don't understand, but maybe someone else could explain.
See https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/29141/interc...
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.
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.
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.
Honestly to me these announcements read as an outright abandonment of frameworks supposed mission.
Feels like a stab in the back.
like everyone else, they’re chasing the AI dragon
The mac studio uses apples upgradeable FU.2 NAND module interface.
It looks like their event drove a lot of traffic towards frame.work - Cloudfare is giving me a 1hr 9min wait to access the site.
https://i.imgur.com/twcxJjr.png
Here's a screenshot (WEBP 1452 x 16383) of the product page, for anyone who wants a glimpse at what's behind the Cloudflare wall:
https://i.ibb.co/Y4n5Qhzm/framework.webp ("Framework Desktop is a big computer made mini")
thank you
Banana for scale!
Isn't the entire purpose of a CDN like cloudflare to enable bursts like that?
CF can only handle static websites, I suspect the issue the store-backend side not being able to catch up.
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.
https://developers.cloudflare.com/waiting-room/
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)
How about Nvidia, they have both good hardware/software.
The 12 isn't even up for preorder, but its landing page is gated by Cloudflare all the same.
site just loaded for me and its just a marketing page.
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.
Same. This is the first time I’ve ever seen the Cloudflare queue screen.
I waited 20 minutes. And it was worth it.
Yeah, I'm generally a big fan of theirs and I like the direction they are headed. Will be interesting to see how these pan out.
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.
Note that this is what CAMM[1] memory is intended to solve, although it remains to be seen to what extent it catches on.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module)
According to Framework, CAMM / LPCAMM is simply not compatible with this line of AMD chips, do to signal integrity reasons.
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.
> 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.
Desktop platforms only have 2 memory channels, amd's latest Epyc servers have 12 channels per socket. Strix Halo has 4 channels.
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.
Nvidia Grace is DDR5, hopper is HBM. Many servers like Intel and AMD's latest and greatest all use DDR5.
Hmm, I think a Threadripper 7965WX can get you there. Probably around 4-5k all in so I guess similar pricing to a Mac Studio.
Or the NVidia Project DIGITS device at 1.5x the cost, but, also Q2 2025 instead of Q3.
But no published memory bandwidth.
512GB/s from insiders
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.
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.
True, but less RAM.
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`.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amds-beastly...
On linux, the gpu can go up to 110 GB.
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.
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...
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's mentioned in LTT video: https://youtu.be/-lErGZZgUbY?t=126
(video also features Framework's founder/CEO)
That's a Windows limitation. On Linux it's 110GB.
This isn't competing with normal desktops.
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.
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.)
> The soldered ram was necessary for Strix Halo
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...
32gb should be plenty for a little emulation station to sit beneath my TV.
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.
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.
I’m happy to answer questions folks have on the Framework Desktop (though probably not until later today).
Congrats on beating HP Z2 Mini G1a and Nvidia Project Digits to market with 128GB of unified memory for LLMs, with bonus Framework port flexibility and a better price than Apple equivalents.
Does the desktop have a discrete physical TPM chip (needed for DRTM support on Windows/Linux/Qubes)? At present, AMD's PSP firmware emulates a "mobile" fTPM that does not support SKINIT.
Would you consider a future model with AMD Ryzen AI Max "Pro" SoC, which has additional security features?
We've been moving to fTPM (AMD's Pluton TPU) in our last couple of generations, including on Framework Desktop. This is something where if we see strong demand to go back to dTPM that we can look at for future generations.
Ryzen PRO SKU would enable these security features, https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen-pro/...?
LLM opacity makes inference hardware a target for silent subversion and manipulation of LLM output. Ryzen PRO security features can be used to configure Linux and Windows systems that verify integrity on every system launch.Sorry to cross your excellent questions, but it doesn’t seem they are beating HP Z2 mini G1a to market. HP announced first week of January that it will be “available in spring”, while now framework announced for Q3.
It also seems HP will use the PRO version of the chip.
Kudos to framework for announcing the price and anchoring the market though!
Hi Nirav! I don't have a question but I just wanted to say I'm a superfan of Framework. I love my AMD 13!
I'm as cynical as it gets when it comes to tech companies, but Framework is the only one that seems to be on track to actually make the world a better place. Please keep doing what you're doing, stick to the mission, and I'll be a customer for life.
Also please make a smartphone so I can finally be on an all-Framework stack! :)
Thanks, glad to hear that!
Before I get into my slew of questions, I am absolutely thrilled to see the return of late-90s transparent colored housings and the like! I'm also happy to see the updated non-Windows keyboard using the Framework logo rather than the generic "Super" text.
#1. Any insight into the 4x PCIe slot not having the end of the slot open which would allow the user to still physically insert 8x or 16x PCIe cards?
#2. Considering a lot of people would use the desktop with ethernet, is the wifi m.2 slot keyed to only accept wifi cards or can it fit a 3rd NVMe SSD as well? (maybe an idea to also pass along to the RISC-V mainboard guys)
#3. Lastly, any chance of revisiting the possibility of upgradable RAM on future desktop models i.e. Zen6 "big APU" if CAMM modules and the like aren't so bleeding edge? (it's looking like DDR6 for example might be CAMM-only) I mean, the fact that CAMM modules lay flat would open the opportunity to have them placed directly on the backside of the CPU which would theoretically result in very short trace lengths relative to front-side CAMM (let alone DIMM).
EDIT #4. Do these Ryzen Max chips support s1/s3 sleep like traditional socketable desktops? (though it sounds like it's starting to become less supported on AM5 sadly)
BONUS. Keyboard/touchpad module(s) for laptop(s) with three (left, middle, right) separate physical mouse buttons when? :P (Heck, on the 16" laptop there's already suspicious blank spaces both above and below the touchpad where they'd fit perfectly...)
There's absolutely nothing repairable about this computer. The motherboard is the entire computer. Only the storage can be replaced.
Do you plan to make computers which can actually be repaired? How exactly is the Framework Desktop any better than what Apple is doing with the Mac? I prefer to build my own machines. Why would I ever choose such a product which can't have parts replaced over something better which enables me to repair and upgrade my computer?
I ask because you were on "Buy now!" which also tackles greenwashing. I fail to see how this product is any better than all of the disposable junk sold by other companies (soldered RAM, soldered CPU, no PCI-E, no second NIC, no expandability of any kind).
Do you plan to sell products with PCI-E ports for dedicated GPUs and other devices?
Has Framework's customer support improved? Do you plan to do something about that? I've read countless posts from people who state they didn't receive a reply from Framework's customer support or that their hardware problems were never resolved. Why should a new customer trust your company?
It seems that the Framework Desktop 1st gen has a 4x PCI-E port. That's not exactly useful for a GPU. I've learned this after watching the LTT video.
> Why would I ever choose such a product which can't have parts replaced over something better which enables me to repair and upgrade my computer?
Because unified memory can't be socketed due to signal integrity issues. Framework asked AMD if there's a possibility and they investigated it, but found that it was just not possible.
I recommend watching the LinusTechTips video about the new framework products. They answered all your questions.
I'm aware of all the limitations they've brought up and how it was sold to the public. It's not as if someone forced them to build this product. They've chosen to build it this way.
This product goes against their principles of building products which are more environmentally friendly. They've done this for the laptops by not forcing people to buy a new laptop when their motherboard is dead or no longer fast enough for the software they run. It's also possible to replace the keyboard, the hinge, the battery, the RAM, the wifi module, the SSD, the touchpad, the case, the display and the expansion modules.
This Framework Desktop 1st gen can have the following components replaced: wifi, SSD, CPU fan, maybe the heatsink, some front panel IO modules, some decorative tiles on the front, the PSU and some parts of the case. A single broken regulator or failing memory chip forces the owner to replace the entire computer. One is forced to replace the entire thing if they have no option to get someone to find the relevant part, desolder the existing one and solder the new one on. This is also not an option for the CPU.
This means that any kind of damage forces the owner to buy another board with CPU and RAM soldered on it for about the same price as the entire thing with the case.
This Framework Desktop computer can be repaired just like most laptops with soldered RAM by replacing the entire motherboard with CPU and RAM. Why would I downgrade the desktop PC's repairability down to that of a laptop? The tradeoff isn't worth it for that price.
Using standard m.2 storage alone makes it 1000 times better than mac
It is indeed better than the Mac. It's still 1000 times worse than a regular desktop PC which lets people swap RAM modules, the CPU, add a dGPU and so on.
Which regular pc desktop under 2000 gets you 128gb of vram?
There's no such desktop PC which offers 128 GB of VRAM. The Framework Desktop doesn't do that for the time being. It's not yet available.
There will be more options by the time this becomes available.
Is there even an announcement that something standard desktop with 128gb of vram with swappable ram sticks is even planned?
How is the planning progress on a trackpoint module?
Every time I consider one of your laptops, I see that there are no options for dedicated page up, page down, home, and end keys and those are deal breakers for me. I always end up with a Lenovo instead.
Would you consider adding keyboard options that include these keys?
FWIW I have a Framework 16, and the keyboards run QMK, so are reprogrammable. I have those keys at the top row of my macropad. They don't have labels and are in kind of a weird place, but probably not less weird than an average laptop.
What the status of open source firmware?
I assume you are talking to AMD about OpenSIL, are you planning on switching to Coreboot with Linuxboot?
Also, any chance delivery to Switzerland? I can't recommend it to people if they can't order it.
If I prepurchase this now, will I be able to run the following on it efficiently:
1. Some kind of quantized version of DeepSeek R1?
2. Flux image generation models via popular tools like A1111 or Comfy?
You’ll be able to run distills of DeepSeek R1. For the full model, you can network together multiple and use exo or llama.cpp RPC.
You can do image generation as well! AMD has some demos of this, and they are maturing PyTorch support to broaden the software ecosystem.
Thanks for the answers. I prepurchased one now out of FOMO, though I'm still trying to figure out if I need to cancel the order or if I can trust that I'll actually be able to run stuff on it.
Regarding LLMs, am I going to be able to run quantized models? Doesn't have to support all quantization methods, but at least one of the popular quantization methods would need to work (e.g. GGUF or EXL2). I ask this because quantized models provide the most "bang for buck" in LLMs.
Regarding image generation, in real workflows there is typically a lot of dependencies (much more than in LLMs, and much more than in toy examples for image generation). I'm wondering how many of these dependencies will in practice be limited to NVIDIA and CUDA. For example, if you grab some popular ComfyUI Flux workflow from Reddit, are you able to actually run that on Framework Desktop?
It sounds fantastic. What are the power draw and noise profiles like? If it's noisy, are there passive cooling options?
Thank you for releasing an update to the Framework 13! I have an original 11th-gen Intel w/ Xe, and I'm now ready to upgrade (esp. the graphics). Stoked I'm still supported! Gonna grab a new screen, a new keyboard, and a new Ryzen!
Amazing to hear that!
Any chance this will get the amd security features for remote management (amd dash) ?
If there was a possibility to get amd dash working this would be the perfect system to use as a home server.
Hey Nirav, any ETA for Framework Desktop (and Framework laptops) availability in Turkey?
Can it run Qubes OS?
Why not? This is a fully capable x86 desktop.
Qubes OS doesn't run on any "fully capable x86 desktop". It's based on Xen and hardware virtualization. There are very few desktop computers recommended to run Qubes [0]. Does Framework support suspend on Qubes? If it works, it could become popular in the Qubes Community.
[0] https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/community-recommended-computers...
I know a core developer (Marek) recently got a Framework 16 and submitted some fixes after early testing iirc - might be worthwhile chasing it with him
Framework 16 has already been tested by the Community: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/framework-laptop-16-amd-ryzen-7...
I was asking about the desktop.
I'm pretty torn when to self-host AI 70 B models. The market seems to be evolving fast. Outside of Apple, this is the first product to really compete in this category Self-host AI. So... I think a second generation will be significantly better than what's currently on offer today. Rationale below...
For a max spec processor with ram at $2,000, this seems like a decent deal given today's market. However, this might age very fast for three reasons.
Reason 1: LPDDR6 may debut in the next year or two this could bring massive improvements to memory bandwidth and capacity for soldered on memory.
LPDDR6 vs LPDDR5 - Data bus width - 24 bits, 16 bits Burst length - 24 bits, 15 bits Memory bandwidth - Up to 38.4 GB/s, Up to 6.7 GB/s
- Camm ram may or may not be maintain signal integrity as memory bandwidth increases. Until I see it implemented for a AI use-case in a cost-effective manner, I am skeptical.
Reason 2: - It's a laptop chip with limited PCI lanes and reduced power envelope. Theoretically, a desktop chip could have better performance, more lanes, socketable (Although, I don't think I've seen a socketed CPU with soldered RAM)
Reason 3: In addition, what does hardware look like being repurposed in the future compared to alternatives?
- Unlike desktop or server counterparts which can have a higher cpu core count, PCEe/IO Expansion, this processor with its motherboard is limited on re-purposing later down the line as a server to self-host other software besides AI. I suppose could be turned into a overkill, NAS with ZFS and HBA Single Controller Card in new case.
- Buying into the framework desktop is pretty limited based on the form factor. Next generation might be able to include a 16x slot fully populated, a 10G nic. That seems about it if they're going to maintain the backward compatibility philosophy given the case form factor.
Framework’s current policy in Asia—limiting deliveries solely to Taiwan—warrants reconsideration. Due to these restrictions, I had no choice but to purchase Apple products instead. To prevent further customer dissatisfaction, Framework should re-evaluate its shipping policies.
I understand that Framework’s logistics cannot match those of major retailers like Amazon or AliExpress. However, many customers rely on freight forwarders to access products from other countries. It is deeply disappointing that Framework does not allow shipments to these intermediaries, as they are a common and well-established workaround for limited international shipping. Given the widespread use of such services, excluding them seems unjustified.
This is to comply with the ever changing export restrictions enacted by the current US administration. So don’t expect it to change soon.
That sounds misleading. The parent comment says all deliveries in Asia are limited to Taiwan. As far as I'm aware, export restrictions are only placed on certain chips going to China.
How do export restrictions prevent Framework from shipping to i.e Japan?
In the case of Japan, it's likely an issue with Japanese regulations.
We have a very strict radio law that applies to anything that can produce radio or em waves
That includes motherboards, since they can technically emit on those frequencies.
From what I have seen, the framework laptop motherboards appear to abide by that law. However, I assume it's just expensive to figure out in the first place.
LTT video specifically states that they were also able to get the Desktop model to be compliant with the (US, I suppose) EMI laws. He also shows the shielded side of the case (only one side is shielded and that was supposedly enough to pass).
Nothing about the current regime projects stability. Taiwan is a strategic partner and the source of many parts, so it’s essentially the only “safe bet” in Asia.
When you’re a company who needs time to adapt to any change in policy (aka all of them) and a company that can’t afford fines for noncompliance (small companies like Framework) your strategy is to be as conservative as possible.
Well, they also manufacture in Taiwan. Their office was around the corner from my restaurant here, and their staff would come in frequently. When I pre-ordered a framework 13 AMD I still lived in the USA and was waitlisted. Ages later I needed my shipping address in Taiwan and they had to completely change a bunch of stuff to make it work. Initially they wanted to put me back on a waitlist but I basically begged and they made it happen. So I guess they maintain two different warehousing and logistics operations between the two countries.
Singapore has one of the most business friendly regulations, a truly tech-savvy well-off consumer base and Framework don't ship there. Its puzzling.
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.
Probably geared towards being a LLM workstation in a small format, similar to a Mac Studio.
Laptop chips often only have x8.
Looks like the Ryzen AI Max chips do have x16: https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen/ai-3...
But you probably want M.2 slots over a single x16 slot.
They could have added a 16 lane upstream, 32 lane downstream PLX switch to packet switch between those devices.
PLX switches are too expensive for a consumer device. There's not enough competition in the PCIe switch market.
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.
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.
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.
>To me there is a market for this kind of product, and it hasn’t been addressed properly yet.
Because the market you describe has very heavy expectations, and very exacting taste.
(And critically, the capability of building one themselves.)
> (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.
Is the audience truly gamers? Presumed this was just poor journalism from ars
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.
So I'd say yes.
their marketing photos include 1) a game controller next to the PC, 2) a bottle of Bawls soda next to the PC, so I think so.
> soldered-down CPU and GPU and soldered-down, non-upgradeable RAM.
They’ve brought some of the traditional modularity from desktop into the laptop world, and now bring us typical laptop design to the desktop world.
Keeping things in perfect balance.
The Framework website right now:
What the hell, Cloudflare? CDN with a wait time, really?Lol - it's not that Cloudflare can't handle the traffic. It's the _framework_ can't handle the traffic and set up Cloudflare to ratelimit entry using their Waiting Room[0] product.
Clearly poorly messaged if it made you think it was a Cloudflare capacity issue!
[0] https://www.cloudflare.com/application-services/products/wai...
WTF indeed, Framework. The whole point of a CDN is to keep your website operational when the number of visits scale up. A "waiting room" might as well be a 404.
Here's a screenshot of https://frame.work/ca/en/blog/category/news:
https://i.imgur.com/7BcLyCX.png
There's nothing up there that couldn't be statically cached.
Except, you know, the entire dynamic functionality of purchasing everything. Taht can't be cached.
That would be a sensible place to use a queue, too bad it's not constrained to there. I'm not familiar with how granular the CloudFlare feature is - could they have enabled it only for a portion of their site like https://frame.work/marketplace?
Otherwise, could be a good reason to use subdomains when architecting sites, say shop.framework.com.
This is weird. You can’t handle the load of a planned announcement on your landing page, in 2025? Something tells me their CTO role could use a new hire.
Quite funny as one of these desktops could likely handle the traffic :)
Not when every second line of code in the framework (haha) used really boils down to 250 calls and abstractions, when most of it is probably just strcpy()
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.
This misses the point. The whole idea of a first party partnership or similar is that there is a known set of hardware and support for it.
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.
[dead]
It will. Bazzite has been providing that to me on older Ryzen mini-PCs for a long while now.
Even if not official, it is perfect hardware for SteamOS and probably works out of the box.
Just about any Linux desktop or laptop supports most/all the games the Steam Deck does (and then some, given the less-severe performance constraints).
Up to 128 GB RAM available for running AI models.
Theoretically awesome, but this might have some interesting market consequences for everyone else.
$2,0000 to $3,000 desktop devices with 128GB of shared GPU/CPU RAM seems to be a segment that is seeing lots of announcements from lots of vendors.
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.
> With what memory bandwidth?
256GB/sec, so roughly M4 Pro throughput.
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.
Right, like the mac studio ultra.
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.
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.
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.
But you can use an AMD EPYC cpu and get 460GB/s bandwidth. Could probably get 512GB RAM for a lot cheaper than 5K.
You’ve gotta deal with amd’s AI software stack though. How is that these days? I assume cuda is still king?
I've been running ollama on an XTX7900 (AMD GPU with 24GB of RAM) with any model that fits in it, and absolutely no issues there.
Inference fine, training less so
> 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.
Framework is REALLY pushing the envelope here. /r/localLLaMA is waiting deperatly for Strix Halo.
Why on earth would someone buy this instead of a regular PC setup, especially at that price point? There's no way I would pay that sort of money and not be able to change out the GPU and RAM, and also only have a single PCIE 4x slot.
Local LLMs that seek 256Gbit/s memory bandwidth to AMD GPU. Alternatives are much more expensive.
The ability to allocate the ram to gpu is the selling point here.
If you want a swappable gpu then a APU isn’t for you
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
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.
I wisth the 12" wouldn't have a garbage screen - although I'm hopeful for more options later on. This format would be equally if not more useful for gaming/business use case, I wonder why they start at the entry level.
Curiously, what do you feel is wrong about the 12" screen?
Two years ago, I switched from my 15" MacBook Pro to the 12" Framework, never looked back. What am I missing?
The Framework Laptop 12 is new, you probably switched to a Framework Laptop 13.
As it's visible from existing material the bezels on the Framework Laptop 12 will be huge and as it's a touchscreen, its readability will be worse.
The 400 nits mainly (looked dim in the presentation even), no high refresh rate, 1440p would have been nice. Unrealted but also only Intel options in 2025?
It'd be hard for me to miss the HDR/Dolby Vision color and brightness and the significantly higher resolution/PPI of the macbook display.
I wish there were any chance in hell that they could turn a profit on a blade server model. I kinda want a backplane with a dozen Framework motherboards plugged into it.
That ITX board looks like it's a stone's throw away.
Coolermaster case has a vesa mount, so it's kind of rackmountable that way.
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?
LPCAMM2 memory is the answer, isn't it?
It's just not catching on, because of course it isn't. Manufacturers have no incentive to let you upgrade parts on your own.
Framework entire brand is to let you upgrade parts on your own, and they said CAMM was technically impossible because signal integrity.
That sounds like an excuse.
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.
Sad that Framework laptops are still not available in Northern Europe, but I guess having regulation that makes new and small players unfeasible is important for some reason.
Framework is available in Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. I think they are only missing Norway.
One of the issues in Europe is that each country has their own language and custom keyboard.
RIP Norway (where I am). I thought it was all of Northern Europe. Most keyboards for Norway are the same as Swedish and Danish. Maybe I can do a gray import from Denmark or Sweden.
https://frame.work/
> Your estimated wait time is 1 hour and 3 minutes.
Ouch
Back to the internet of the nineties. But even then there wasn't a queue to "view" a website.
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…
Yeah, for the shop it makes total sense, but for the front-page not so much.
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.
what is the pitch, because desktops don't have a problem with replacements, repairs etc.
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.
Repair-friendly form factor for a "Unified Memory" platform.
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.
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.
To get an M4 Max so you can have 128GB, you need a macbook pro.
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.
Yep. You can get an M3 Max refurbished, but will make some tradeoff with GPU performance.
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.
Nvidia project Digits seems to fall in a similar category, no?
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?
It is, and the keynote briefly mentioned it.
Yes, very, but so far they haven't mentioned the memory bandwidth.
256 GB/s memory bandwidth for $2000.
Which should also be available from all the usual motherboard manufacturers. Possibly well before this one, since it doesn't ship until Q3.
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.
Sure, to the extent that happens, the Framework will compete with them. Competition is great.
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.
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...
128GB unified memory
I've been building mini ITX systems since 2013, trying to accomplish what they've done. It's a kickass form factor. All in one systems like this are wicked, and they've pushed for modularity too, which is the reason to do this rather than a laptop or enterprise product (not Framework laptops tho, which is their draw too). Very excited.
The announcement video.
The desktop is 15 minutes in. (After the notebook announcements)
https://www.youtube.com/live/dnCGwii7FqY?si=0ppcg_cjj8I-5P67
I like framework and have two of the 13s, one Intel one AMD.
Am happy with both but the AMD doesn’t support S3 sleep, and so I mildly regret buying it. Will probably not leave my desk often.
Also don’t believe they support ECC memory yet. Don’t think I’ll buy another PC without it.
The Ryzen APU could be interesting for running local AI models and with 128 GB of RAM you can fit quite a large model. Plus it should be relatively energy efficient compared to a full size desktop build with separate GPU. Lack of PCIe 5.0 is a bit of a bummer as you could otherwise plug in some new Samsung 9100 Pro NVMe drives.
Would love to see how it performs. It supposedly has a memory bandwidth of 256 GB/sec which is about similar to a Threadripper Pro 7965WX with 8 memory channels. A Mac Studio M2 Ultra has 800 GB/sec of bandwidth though (which is RTX4080/RTX5080 territory) but is also about 2-3x more expensive at 128 GB of memory, not to mention the cost of upgrading internal storage.
They should work just fine, sure peak bandwidth will be limited, but most workloads are not bottlenecked by I/O bandwidth on PCIe 4, but are limited by IOPs which should be decent on the 9100.
In the title, how does "unique" contradict "strange?"
I think in the minds of not-particularly-literate online writers, "strange" = "bad" and "unique" = "good".
I am also wondering this
A 12 month warranty for a $3000 AUD motherboard is a bit rough.
Tangentially related but what does a “Radeon 8060S” mean? I’m so confused what the memory bandwidth is and how much VRAM (I think it’s shared?). I was gonna buy a M2 studio for local LLM but this seems like a good choice. But I can’t figure out what the token/s would be like. I have Qwen2.5 3B running on a Mac mini M1 and it’s not great. Slow and gets stuff wrong. If I can get the 14B running with a response time below 3 seconds for Home Assistant, it would be perfect.
Edit: found it, 256 GB/s for the shared memory bandwidth
Cool but this shows off the absolute pointlessness of the Framework concept - when you have RAM, CPU and GPU integrated, you essentially have something as modular as a modern Mac, which goes against any idea of modularity.
This has been the future for more than a decade, evidenced by stuff like smartphones and games consoles, and as far as I know, Nvidia is also working on their SoC, and so does Intel (which I think was the whole point of their gaming GPU push).
How can you say that when a laptop (let’s agree to focus on the FW laptops for now) has so many other components beyond the SoC/mainboard?
Even ignoring the fact that the FW 13 and FW 16 have socketed/upgradable RAM, you’ve got the chassis, the screen, the wireless card, storage, the keyboard, and more.
If you had bought the FW 13 upon release (in 2021, I think), you have already had several opportunities to upgrade the guts of the computer while keeping everything else the same. If my CPU is no longer suitable for my needs, then why should I have to also replace my display? If it were a desktop computer, that’d obviously be preposterous. And FW has made products that make it preposterous for laptops too.
On the whole, I think you may be confusing the goals of repairability and upgradability with the notion of modularity. They’re not wholly unrelated of course, but they are different, and I think it’s clear that FW accomplishes those goals.
Signed, Someone who wishes they had a FW
Currently, I'm using generative AI of various kinds on my M1 Air (llm, image gen, TTS, STT), but am frustrated by the limitations - primarily memory and secondarily availability of an MLX adaptation.
Just an AI hobbyist, so I don't have time or inclination to tweak everything. Given the non-NVIDIA GPU, how painful will it be to play around with new AI models on this system?
I run all the AI models without any issues with a desktop Radeon. I don't even think about it, just start the ollama docker and run the models.
Inference is not an issue with AMD.
Bit of an odd one really, they've introduced modularity and customisation to the laptop market where there wasn't any.
But they have now introduced reduced modularity and customisation in comparison with what's available in the desktop market. CPU is soldered, RAM Is soldered and the GPU is soldered.
This desktop will be perfect for me, as well as 12" lappie... Give me 128Gb of ram with good number of processor cores that is not $5K or so. I am already moving towards Linux, this will be the moment.
I was looking from GMKTex and Beelink to have at least 64Gb, but this is fantastic deal and I can't wait for it.
Happy to see them announce the new AMD chips in the 13", but the prices are a little nuts compared to what you can get elsewhere.
I bet the desktop is interesting, but first I was in a 30m waiting room to access their website (what?!?) and then the button to pre order the desktop is broken. Ouch.
128GB is quite useless when the bandwidth is 256GB/s (~210 real world).
The sweet spot is 64GB but the M4 Pro Mini 64GB is a better deal at that RAM capacity.
>> "A fully loaded 128GB with a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 configuration (16 CPU cores, 40 GPU cores) will run you $1,999."
That's a no-brainer to replace my laptop-as-desktop in the next few years. By then, I expect this will be even better.
I was actually looking at getting a 395 Max with that 8060s iGPU and looking for mini-PCs or motherboards. This should make a killer console replacement with Bazzite (once they sort out the minor niggles that come with the new chipset).
I got a job some time back, at the interview they asked where I got tech news. I said ARS Technica, and they looked at me like I'd sprouted another head.
They fired me a few weeks in, but then went out of business.
So cool for LLM inference, wish they had the cajones to ship some soldered lpddr in a laptop form factory for the bandwidth, but i guess ill have to wait for the lpcamm generation to arrive
Why would they have soldered RAM? Isn't that antithetical to their mission?
It kind of is, and the CEO admits it on stage, but it's soldered because of an AMD limitation they couldn't work around.
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 they try to pitch as a gaming machine—when their laptop fundamentals are still admittedly shaky, and the gaming market still doesn't seem to care for or about them very much at all—just keeps eroding the confidence that this is going to work out in the end.
> 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.
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
Nvidia must be extremely nervous about this - the most direct threat to the RTX4090.
But hey, they've refused to provide GPUs with lots of RAM at a cheap price so competition, y'all.
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)."
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-slides-c...
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 it's equivalent to a laptop 4070, not to a desktop one.
well, that's a hostile naming scheme
from the specs, a mobile 4070 looks like its basically a 4060 ti, underclocked to ~60%
Internal PSU - instant buy.
Sad about the soldered ram. Socketable ram is not that of a perf downgrade and much more in line.
Translucent case? Ryzen CPU with the massive integrated GPU? Definitely my next laptop.
I was really look forward to an ARM laptop. Hopefully they will develop one soon.
They should wait for Snapdragon X2 and Nvidia "N1".
I was really hoping for an ARM laptop. Hopefully they'll develop one soon.
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.
You can get, uhhhh, RISC-V. We have ARM at home? https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard
RISCV is garbage for real use currently.
Arm laptops are plenty competitive with the x86 space with the snapdragons now.
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.
if you're in the Local LLMs world this is an interesting choice. All they care about is lots of fast RAM. 128GB at $2k is a good price when compared to Mac Studios
Anyone know the tokens/sec for llm inference?
Wait, so I’d have to use ROCm for compute?
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.
My hope is that the popularity of this hardware creates pressure to improve ROCm software support.
Me & my 7900 XTX will be quite grateful if it does.
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.
The i740 did have some nice drivers....
Annoyingly they don't disclose that the Zen 5 ryzen chips are a mix of Zen 5 and Zen 5c low cache density optimized cores.
I think Strix Halo doesn't have any Zen 5c.
The framework 13 laptop chips have Zen 5c cores.
And that is relevant to the Framework desktop how exactly?
All laptops are using hybrid P and E cores now. That's just how it works.
I like the case. Nice and compact, and the swappable tiles are cute. If the case works well with non-Framework Mini-ITX motherboards I'd be tempted to pick one up.
The innards, however, are disappointing:
- I get the explanation for why soldered RAM was necessary, but that's still pretty darn close to a dealbreaker for me; I'm inclined to wait for a future motherboard revision without that limitation
- Only two Expansion Cards is vastly fewer than what I'd expect from a "Framework Desktop"
- The lack of a dGPU is unfortunate for a desktop
If I were to design a Framework Desktop, I'd replace the entire rear panel with nothing but Expansion Card slots. Literally as many as will fit; fucking fill it to the goddamn brim. And then throw in some USB4 headers to connect to even more Expansion Card slots on the front. I want a terrifyingly large number of Expansion Cards. More Type-C ports than any computer has any business having, and then even more. I don't just want people questioning my sanity; I want it to be known, plain as day, that I have gone certifiably batfuck insane.
I'd also expose the same Expansion Bay interface as the Framework 16, and offer a desktop-grade GPU in that form factor (presumably too thick and power-hungry for a laptop, but if a Framework 16 owner wants a laptop with a dummy thicc dumptruck of an ass and 30 minutes of battery life, then who am I to judge?).
And air-cooling? So 20th Century! Good opportunity as any to make liquid cooling a mainstream option.
Article says there are six ports on the back, in which case you won't need expansion cards back there, as they'd be less space efficient.
Can we also have a desktop keyboard trackpad combo?
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.
You can do that with https://www.coolermaster.com/en-global/products/framework/
This announcement is bog standard mini-ITX.
Which is developed together with which company? Could you guess?
Technically, those tiny USB-to-whatever blocks of their laptops can be considered components and you can supposedly swap them with the desktop:
> (note the two bays for Framework's expansion cards at the bottom)
It's a real shame the memory isn't a 512 bit bus or higher for comparable bandwidth to apple's M max series. If they had accomplished that at this price they would sell like crazy I think for AI. Having the downsides of soldered ram without the upsides of pushing it to a much higher bandwidth is a bummer. I assume that is on AMD though and not something Framework could control. Regardless happy to have more options. I really hope there are more options in the near future for integrated boards with a large variety of bandwidth choices and ram capacities.