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.
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.
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.
Considering Intel's track record on hardware vulnerabilities, I'd much rather prefer AMD.
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.
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...
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.
Because AMD chips achieve ARM efficiency without dealing with ARM compatibility mess.
Strix Point AMD laptop CPUs are just better than non-Apple ARM CPUs across the board, and don't have the whole host of compatibility issues. There isn't really any point to them.
They are a fairly small company, and going for amd/intel means reaching the widest audience.
Linux on arm is very mature, but windows on arm not completely.
That being said, other companies could very well develop and sell boards for the frameworks laptop. So much so that iirc sifive did release a risc-v laptop board to use in the frameworks laptop case.
Is Windows on ARM still immature? I'd think with the Microsoft Surface (ARM processors for several years now) that Windows on ARM would be fine but I've never owned or used one so I don't have any anecdotal evidence, just my assumptions.
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).
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.
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.
Was over an hour earlier today.
I would love to see one of these hinges as a mod for the Framework 13...
Sorry, my mistake, as others have noted. I corrected my post.
It is a 360 hinge.
The 12 inch is what I will be considering purchasing as I already have a 13 inch AMD that I am pretty happy with.
Having seen how students treat school-provided Chromebooks, those IO modules will get lost and damaged at light speed.
The great thing about IO modules is that if they outer side is damaged you can just replace it
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.
That's what we call a canny business model!
They can get screwed down by an internal screw. They explained that for this specific use case in the linustechtips video.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
Only because of Samsung's VR headsets, it was ridiculous and useless otherwise.
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
It's higher DPI than a 24" 4K monitor. It is plenty dense, especially for a battery powered device where the power needed to drive the display is a real consideration.
That's why this has half the resolution of my current same size 12'' tablet, even though my current device has also half the battery capacity, and likely costed half than this thing will cost.
Even if you use today's prices, the cheapest iPad has almost double the resolution. No, 1080p at 12'' it is not plenty dense. You do not put this smaller thing as far from your face as a 24'' monitor.
Triple the DPI? Are you doing the calculations right? The DPI of this screen is 189. The iPad Standard, Air, and Pro at 11 and 13 inches have a DPI of 264. The iPad Mini is a standout at 326 DPI, which is 1.72x the DPI.
You are correct; I am using number of horizontal lines rather than computing the actual DPI. But this barely changes my argument, since even when they are at screens of similar size cheap iPads have double the number of horizontal lines. I have updated my post to reflect that.
The way to analyze this is using pixel density: 1900x1200 on a 12" display is only 187 PPI, which is frustratingly below the "retina" range at the usual distance of a laptop screen (much less a tablet one, and this one is part tablet). The resolution you want for a 12" screen is 2560x1600, which is also 16:10 but at a much more usable 251 PPI.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
There isn't any standard to put that kind of RAM on DIMM-like slots.
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.
Apparently this is due to signal integrity. AMD says swappable RAM is not possible. Source: LinusTechTips video.
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, and they have less BW than this solution.
Yeah, in LTT video they are talking with the CEO https://youtu.be/-lErGZZgUbY?t=447
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They just got me as a new customer with this AI miniPC. It's the first Framework product I've bought.
> 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.
> 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.
I presume that my core values, which I might know just a teeny tiny bit, align with what the corporation has stated as their values. But at the end of the day, the"core values" of a corporation are just some words on a webpage on the journey to more profit and I mean, hey, I like money too, so it's not like I can really fault them for pivoting.
This is literally the same product they've been selling with just one more component soldered on (memory). I think it's a bit of a stretch to call it a "pivot".
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. I'm not sure what you're arguing with me about.
They saw an underserved niche and went for it. Based on the wait time for their site seems to be working for them.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Apparently that AMD CPU isnt even compatible with CAMM2 because of technical reasons. Framework CEO explained it in LinusTechTips video.
Honestly to me these announcements read as an outright abandonment of frameworks supposed mission.
Feels like a stab in the back.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)
How about Nvidia, they have both good hardware/software.
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.
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.
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?
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! :)
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!
How is the planning progress on a trackpoint module?
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.
Can it run Qubes OS?
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.
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.
According to Framework, CAMM / LPCAMM is simply not compatible with this line of AMD chips, do to signal integrity reasons.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Or the NVidia Project DIGITS device at 1.5x the cost, but, also Q2 2025 instead of Q3.
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Probably geared towards being a LLM workstation in a small format, similar to a Mac Studio.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Framework website right now:
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.
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.
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()
Framework is REALLY pushing the envelope here. /r/localLLaMA is waiting deperatly for Strix Halo.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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
Local LLMs that seek 256Gbit/s memory bandwidth to AMD GPU. Alternatives are much more expensive.
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.
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.
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, wall-mounted 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 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 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 powered, 2.5 Gib 8 port PoE switch 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 unsuspecting hardware or software.
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 is, and the keynote briefly mentioned it.
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.
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
The framework website currently has a strange message about putting users into queues just to view the homepage. Might be time to start thinking about setting up Varnish
I 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).
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.
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.
Sad about the soldered ram. Socketable ram is not that of a perf downgrade and much more in line.
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.
This is a cool product for people who want a lot of RAM for LLMs. Those like me who build their own systems would get better value out of a machine they've built.
The only parts which can be customized for this product are the presence or absence of a handle, the cooler's fan, the case's side and some front tiles. That's it. The m.2 SSD and the wifi are the only components which can be replaced.
This isn't the kind of product I wanted Framework to make. I was hoping they'd make hardware which can be repaired and which has components available for it. The motherboard has all the chips and everything else soldered on it. The most expensive part of the computer needs to be replaced if a voltage regulator or some other part found on the motherboard fails. There's no cheap $ 100-200 motherboard to replace in this product. It's the same problem as with Apple's Macs.
Can someone at Framework answer this question: what do the customers do with your Framework Desktop hardware once it breaks and you no longer support it? It's e-waste. What happens when the motherboard in my computer dies? I buy only a replacement motherboard while keeping the RAM, the CPU and GPU, unlike for Framework Desktop. What happens when the GPU I have is no longer useful or supported? I buy only a new GPU.
This board doesn't even have PCI-E for a GPU. This product is only good as long as the iGPU provides the required performance for whatever application is of interest. This is a weakness the Framework 13 motherboard shares. There's no way to remove the board from its case to use it with a PCI-E x16 GPU with the right PSU.
AMD is known to abandon their customers once they release newer dGPUs and SoCs with iGPUs. This can be easily observed if you review the countless reports for crashes with amdgpu on Linux. The amdgpu driver has various bugs which lead to crashes of the GPU or of the entire machine. They're also not good at shipping CPU microcode for consumer CPUs to address hardware bugs and CVEs.
As a side note, even the Framework AI HX laptops are extremely expensive for what they offer in terms of hardware. A laptop which goes above $ 2000 without RAM, an SSD, a charger and without any adapters for those bays seems to be a good deal? That's absurd. There are laptops with 32 GB of RAM, the same CPU, better displays, a 1 TB SSD, a charger and all the required ports present on the laptop for less than $ 2000 (including taxes).
I hope someone from Framework reads this. I want repairable products which can be upgraded without replacing a monolithic part which is the entire computer.
Other noteworthy things
- their site went down hard with a queue to see the site... downright absurd
- they haven't posted the specs of the Framework 12
- there are still no actual repair centers which repair their products, no physical stores or sellers which sell Framework products outside of their site
- there have been reports of people who didn't have their hardware problems with Framework laptops addressed, even LTT addressed such issues
I 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.
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.
I was really look forward to an ARM laptop. Hopefully they will develop one soon.
They should wait for Snapdragon X2 and Nvidia "N1".
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.
Anyone know the tokens/sec for llm inference?
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.
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.
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...
>> "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.
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.
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)
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....
