So can someone who understands this stuff better than me explain how the L3 cache would affect performance? My X3D has a 96 MB cache, and all of these offerings are lower than that.
This has no X3D, the L3 is shared between CCDs. The only odd thing about this is it has a relatively small “last level” cache on the GPU/Memory die, but X3D CPUs are still kings of single-threaded performance since that L3 is right on the CPU.
This thing has over twice the RAM bandwidth of the desktop CPUs though, and some apps like that. Just depends on the use case.
and some apps like that.
I’d wager a guess: AI?
Question about how shared VRAM works
So I need to specify in the BIOS the split, and then it’s dedicated at runtime, or can I allocate VRAM dynamically as needed by workload?
On macos you don’t really have to think about this, so wondering how this compares.
It will most likely be dynamic, with the option to statically set it.
On my 7800, it’s static. The 2GB I allocate is not usable for the CPU, and compute apps don’t like it “overflowing” past that.
This is on Linux, on a desktop, ASRock mobo. YMMV.
It’s typically dynamic
Lmao the news about this desktop is strangling their website to the point of needing a 45 minute waiting list
The Lemmy Lick strikes again!
Guilty. This thing came out at the perfect time and I was considering building my own or a Mac mini but this has 95% of what I’m looking for for less than a spec compromised Mac mini. So I preordered. And I kept hitting refresh lol.
I always think the Mac mini is just a bit too mini. It’s a desktop so it’s not exactly going to be moved around a lot so it doesn’t need to be quite that tiny and this thing is a good compromise between still being small but without being so small that it offers no upgradability.
And I know Apple says otherwise but surely that thing must get thermally throttled at some point.
I visited their website literally within about 10 minutes of them announcing the product and I had to wait 8 minutes to get in.
If framework has, or had, one problem, it was that the main appeal of their products was the repairability, the products themselves were only okay in terms of specs. Well now they have really decent specs as well.
I could absolutely see schools wanting to deploy these to their students.
They did announce three major products today.
Yeah that touchscreen tablet convertible machine is what has me psyched. I’m not the target for it, and already own a 16, but I could see that thing selling well. I honestly think they came out with the desktop because they just kinda felt they needed a desktop.
I have a 16 and a 13, I thought I’d give away the 13 when I got the 16 but I keep using the 13 as well cause of how portable it is. Lot nicer to lounge about with the 13 than the 16.
I might get the 12 to replace my 13 and use it for drawing practice and web browsing. Performance wise it’d be a downgrade from my 1280p but I don’t really need the performance.
It’s kinda cool but seems a bit expensive at this moment.
For the performance, it’s actually quite reasonable. 4070-like GPU performance, 128gb of memory, and basically the newest Ryzen CPU performance, plus a case, power supply, and fan, will run you about the same price as buying a 4070, case, fan, power supply, and CPU of similar performance. Except you’ll actually get a faster CPU with the Framework one, and you’ll also get more memory that’s accessible by the GPU (up to the full 128gb minus whatever the CPU is currently using)
I swear, you people must be paid to shill garbage.
Always a response for anyone who has higher standards, lol.
“It’s too expensive”
“It’s actually fairly priced for the performance it provides”
“You people must be paid to shill garbage”
???
Ah yes, shilling garbage, also known as: explaining that the price to performance ratio is just better, actually.
Calling it a gaming PC feels misleading. It’s definitely geared more towards enterprise/AI workloads. If you want upgradeable just buy a regular framework. This desktop is interesting but niche and doesn’t seem like it’s for gamers.
I think it’s like Apple-Niche
I feel like this is a big miss by framework. Maybe I just don’t understand because I already own a Velka 3 that i used happily for years and building small form factor with standard parts seems better than what this is offering. Better as in better performance, aesthetics, space optimization, upgradeability - SFF is not a cheap or easy way to build a computer.
The biggest constraint building in the sub-5 liter format is GPU compatibility because not many manufacturers even make boards in the <180mm length category. Also can’t go much higher than 150-200 watts because cooling is so difficult. There are still options though, i rocked a PNY 1660 super for a long time, and the current most powerful option is a 4060ti. Although upgrades are limited to what manufacturers occasionally produce, it is upgradeable, and it is truly desktop performance.
On the CPU side, you can physically put in whatever CPU you want. The only limitation is that the cooler, alpenfohn black ridge or noctua l9a/l9i, probably won’t have a good time cooling 100+ watts without aggressive undervolting and power limits. 65 watts TDP still gives you a ryzen 7 9700x.
Motherboards have the SFF tax but are high quality in general. Flex ATX PSUs were a bit harder to find 5 or 6 years ago but now the black 600W enhance ENP is readily available from Velkase’s website. Drives and memory are completely standard. m.2 fits with the motherboard, 2.5in SATA also fits in one of the corners. Normal low profile DDR5 is replaceable / upgradeable.
What framework is releasing is more like a laptop board in a ~4 liter case and I really don’t like that in order to upgrade any part of CPU, GPU or memory you have to replace the entire board because it’s soldered on APU and not socketed or discrete components. Framework’s enclosure hasn’t been designed to hold a motherboard+discrete GPU and the board doesn’t have a PCIe slot if you wanted to attach a card via riser in another case. It could be worse but I don’t see this as a good use of development resources.
I think the biggest limiting factor for your mini PC will always be the VRAM and any workload that enjoys that fast RAM speed. Really, I think this mini PC from framework is only sensible for certain workloads. It was poised as a mobile chip and certainly is majorly power efficient. On the other hand I don’t think it is for large scaling but more for testing at home or working at home on the cheap. It isn’t something I expected from framework though as I expected them to maintain modularity and the only modularity here is the little USB cards and the 3D printed front panel designs lol
Edit
Personally I am in that niche market of high RAM speed. Also, access to high VRAM for occasional LLM testing. Though it is an AMD and I don’t know if am comfortable switching from Nvidia for that workload just yet. Renting a GPU is just barely cheap enough.
Now, can we have a cool European company doing similar stuff? At the rate it’s going I can’t decide whether I shouldn’t buy American because I don’t want to support a fascist country or because I’m afraid the country might crumble so badly that I can’t count on getting service for my device.
Wait I thought they were a Taiwanese company?
This comment made me double check. They’re from San Francisco: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_Computer
I’d prefer to buy taiwanese tbh. 😉
I could envision MNT Research trying this in the future, but not for now.
I can’t even get 96GB of RAM to work properly with the latest AMD drivers on my Framework. How will I know that AMD drivers won’t be a fuck up for this PC in configuratios over 64GB???
I don’t get the point. Framework laptops are interesting because they are modular but for desktop PCs that’s the default. And Framework’s PCs are less modular than a standard PC because the RAM is soldered
That makes no sense - that’s more like Apple then…
I don’t know if it’s the case, but modular IO on PC maybe nice.
Not really sure who this is for. With soldered RAM is less upgradeable than a regular PC.
AI nerds maybe? Sure got a lot of RAM in there potentially attached to a GPU.
But how capable is that really when compared to a 5090 or similar?
The 5090 is basically useless for AI dev/testing because it only has 32GB. Mind as well get an array of 3090s.
The AI Max is slower and finicky, but it will run things you’d normally need an A100 the price of a car to run.
But that aside, there are tons of workstations apps gated by nothing but VRAM capacity that this will blow open.
… but only OpenCL workloads, right?
No, it runs off integrated graphics, which is a good thing because you can have a large capacity of ram dedicated to GPU loads
Not exactly. OpenCL as a compute framework is kinda dead.
What types of compute can you run on an AMD GPU today?
Most CUDA or PyTorch apps can be run through ROCM. Your performance/experience may vary. ZLUDA is also being revived as an alternate route to CUDA compat, as the vast majority of development/intertia is with CUDA.
Vulkan has become a popular “community” GPU agnostic API, all but supplanting OpenCL, even though it’s not built for that at all. Hardware support is just so much better, I suppose.
There are some other efforts trying to take off, like MLIR-based frameworks (with Mojo being a popular example), Apache TVM (with MLC-LLM being a prominent user), XLA or whatever Google is calling it now, but honestly getting away from CUDA is really hard. It doesn’t help that Intel’s unification effort is kinda failing because they keep dropping the ball on the hardware side.
Useless is a strong term. I do a fair amount of research on a single 4090. Lots of problems can fit in <32 GB of VRAM. Even my 3060 is good enough to run small scale tests locally.
I’m in CV, and even with enterprise grade hardware, most folks I know are limited to 48GB (A40 and L40S, substantially cheaper and more accessible than A100/H100/H200). My advisor would always say that you should really try to set up a problem where you can iterate in a few days worth of time on a single GPU, and lots of problems are still approachable that way. Of course you’re not going to make the next SOTA VLM on a 5090, but not every problem is that big.
Fair. True.
If your workload/test fits in 24GB, that’s already a “solved” problem. If it fits in 48GB, it’s possibly solved with your institution’s workstation or whatever.
But if it takes 80GB, as many projects seem to require these days since the A100 is such a common baseline, you are likely using very expensive cloud GPU time. I really love the idea of being able to tinker with a “full” 80GB+ workload (even having to deal with ROCM) without having to pay per hour.
Yeah, I agree that it does help for some approaches that do require a lot of VRAM. If you’re not on a tight schedule, this type of thing might be good enough to just get a model running.
I don’t personally do anything that large; even the diffusion methods I’ve developed were able to fit on a 24GB card, but I know with the hype in multimodal stuff, VRAM needs can be pretty high.
I suspect this machine will be popular with hobbyists for running really large open weight LLMs.
This is my use case exactly.
I do a lot of analysis locally, this is more than enough for my experiments and research. 64 to 96gb VRAM is exactly the window I need. There are analyses I’ve had to let run for 2 or 3 days and dealing with that on the cloud is annoying.
Plus this will replace GH Copilot for me. It’ll run voice models. I have diffusion model experiments I plan to run but are totally inaccessible locally to me (not just image models). I’ve got workloads that take 2 or 3 days at 100% CPU/GPU that are annoying to run in the cloud.
This basically frees me from paying for any cloud stuff in my personal life for the foreseeable future. I’m trying to localize as much as I can.
I’ve got tons of ideas I’m free to try out risk free on this machine, and it’s the most affordable “entry level” solution I’ve seen.
And even better, “testing” it. Maybe I’m sloppy, but I have failed runs, errors, hacks, hours of “tinkering,” optimizing, or just trying to get something to launch that feels like an utter waste of an A100 mostly sitting idle… Hence I often don’t do it at all.
One thing you should keep in mind is that the compute power of this thing is not like an A/H100, especially if you get a big slowdown with rocm, so what could take you 2-3 days could take over a week. It’d be nice if framework sold a cheap MI300A, but… shrug.
I don’t mind that it’s slower, I would rather wait than waste time on machines measured in multiple dollars per hour.
I’ve never locked up an A100 that long, I’ve used them for full work days and was glad I wasn’t paying directly.
Not really sure who this is for.
Second sentence in the linked article.
Soldered on ram and GPU. Strange for Framework.
Apparently AMD couldn’t make the signal integrity work out with socketed RAM. (source: LTT video with Framework CEO)
IMHO: Up until now, using soldered RAM was lazy and cheap bullshit. But I do think we are at the limit of what’s reasonable to do over socketed RAM. In high performance datacenter applications, socketed RAM is on it’s way out (see: MI300A, Grace-{Hopper,Blackwell},Xeon Max), with onboard memory gaining ground. I think we’ll see the same trend on consumer stuff as well. Requirements on memory bandwidth and latency are going up with recent trends like powerful integrated graphics and AI-slop, and socketed RAM simply won’t work.
It’s sad, but in a few generations I think only the lower end consumer CPUs will be possible to use with socketed RAM. I’m betting the high performance consumer CPUs will require not only soldered, but on-board RAM.
Finally, some Grace Hopper to make everyone happy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gYqF6-h9Cvg
Sound like a downgrade to me I rather have capability of adding more ram than having a soldered limited one doesn’t matter if it’s high performance. Especially for consumer stuff.
Looking at my actual PCs built in the last 25 years or so, I tend to buy a lot of good spec ram up front and never touch it again. My desktop from 2011 has 16GB and the one from 2018 has 32GB. With both now running Linux, it still feels like plenty.
When I go to build my next system, if I could get a motherboard with 64 or 128GB soldered to it, AND it was like double the speed, I might go for that choice.
We just need to keep competition alive in that space to avoid the dumb price gouging you get with phones and Macs and stuff.
Sounds like a load of bullshit to feed useful idiots.
There’s even the next iteration already happening: Cerebras is maling wafer-scale chipa with integrated SRAM. If you want to have the highest memory-bandwith to your cpu core it has to lay exactly next to it ON the chip.
Ultimately RAM and processor will probably be indistinguishable with the human eye.
I definitely wouldn’t mind soldered RAM if there’s still an expansion socket. Solder in at least a reasonable minimum (16G?) and not the cheap stuff but memory that can actually use the signal integrity advantage, I may want more RAM but it’s fine if it’s a bit slower. You can leave out the DIMM slot but then have at least one PCIe x16 expansion slot. A free one, one in addition to the GPU slot. PCIe latency isn’t stellar but on the upside, expansion boards would come with their own memory controllers, and push come to shove you can configure the faster RAM as cache / the expansion RAM as swap.
Heck, throw the memory into the CPU package. It’s not like there’s ever a situation where you don’t need RAM.
All your RAM needs to be the same speed unless you want to open up a rabbit hole. All attempts at that thus far have kinda flopped. You can make very good use of such systems, but I’ve only seen it succeed with software specifically tailored for that use case (say databases or simulations).
The way I see it, RAM in the future will be on package and non-expandable. CXL might get some traction, but naah.
The cache hierarchy has flopped? People aren’t using swap?
NUMA also hasn’t flopped, it’s just that most systems aren’t multi socket, or clusters. Different memory speeds connected to the same CPU is not ideal and you don’t build a system like that but among upgraded systems that’s not rare at all and software-wise worst thing that’ll happen is you get the lower memory speed. Which you’d get anyway if you only had socketed RAM.
Yeah, the cache hierarchy is behaving kinda wonky lately. Many AI workloads (and that’s what’s driving development lately) are constrained by bandwidth, and cache will only help you with a part of that. Cache will help with repeated access, not as much with streaming access to datasets much larger than the cache (i.e. many current AI models).
Intel already tried selling CPUs with both on-package HBM and slotted DDR-RAM. No one wanted it, as the performance gains of the expensive HBM evaporated completely as soon as you touched memory out-of-package. (Assuming workloads bound by memory bandwidth, which currently dominate the compute market)
To get good performance out of that, you may need to explicitly code the memory transfers to enable prefetch (preferably asynchronous) from the slower memory into the faster, á la classic GPU programming. YMMW.
I wasn’t really thinking of HPC but my next gaming rig, TBH. The OS can move often accessed pages into faster RAM just as it can move busy threads to faster cores, gaining you some fps a second or two after alt-tabbing back to the game after messing around with firefox. If it wasn’t for memory controllers generally driving channels all at the same speed that could already be a thing right now. It definitely already was a thing back in the days of swapping out to spinning platters.
Not sure about HBM in CPUs in general but with packaging advancement any in-package stuff is only going to become cheaper, HBM, pedestrian bandwidth, doesn’t matter.
In systems where memory speed are mismatched, the system runs at the slowest module’s speed. So literally making the soldered, faster memory slower. Why even have soldered memory at that point?
I’d assume the soldered memory to have a dedicated memory controller. There’s also no hard requirement that a single controller can’t drive different channels at different speeds. The only hard requirement is that one channel needs to run at one speed.
…and the whole thing becomes completely irrelevant when we’re talking about PCIe expansion cards the memory controller doesn’t care.
Couldn’t you just treat the socketed ram like another layer of memory effectively meaning that L1-3 are on the CPU “L4” would be soldered RAM and then L5 would be extra socketed RAM? Alternatively couldn’t you just treat it like really fast swap?
Using it as cache would reduce total capacity as cache implies coherence, and treating it as ordinary swap would mean copying to main memory before you access it which is silly when you can access it directly. That is you’d want to write a couple of lines of kernel code to use it effectively but it’s nowhere close to rocket science. Nowhere near as complicated as making proper use of NUMA architectures.
Could it work?
Yes, but it would require:
- A redesigned memory controller capable of tiering RAM (which would be more complex).
- OS-level support for dynamically assigning memory usage based on speed (Operating systems and applications assume all RAM operates at the same speed).
- Applications/libraries optimized to take advantage of this tiering.
Right now, the easiest solution for fast, high-bandwidth RAM is just to solder all of it.
Wrote a longer reply to someone else, but briefly, yes, you are correct. Kinda.
Caches won’t help with bandwidth-bound compute (read: ”AI”) it the streamed dataset is significantly larger than the cache. A cache will only speed up repeated access to a limited set of data.
Honestly I upgrade every few years and isually have to purchase a new mobo anyhow. I do think this could lead to less options for mobos though.
I get it but imagine the GPU style markup when all mobos have a set amount of RAM. You’ll have two identical boards except for $30 worth of memory with a price spread of $200+. Not fun.
I don’t think you are wrong, but I don’t think you go far enough. In a few generations, the only option for top performance will be a SoC. You’ll get to pick which SoC you want and what box you want to put it in.
the only option for top performance will be a SoC
System in a Package (SiP) at least. Might not be efficient to etch the logic and that much memory onto the same silicon die, as the latest and greatest TSMC node will likely be much more expensive per square mm than the cutting edge memory production node from Samsung or whatever foundry where the memory is being made.
But with advanced packaging going the way it’s been over the last decade or so, it’s going to be hard to compete with the latency/throughout of an in-package interposer. You can only do so much with the vias/pathways on a printed circuit board.
You are correct, I’m referring to on package. Need more coffee.
No, I don’t think you owe an apology. It’s a super common terminology almost to the point where I wouldn’t really even consider it outright wrong to describe it as a SoC. It’s just that the blurred distinction between a single chip and multiple chiplets packaged together are almost impossible for an outsider to tell without really getting into the published spec sheets for a product (and sometimes may not even be known then).
It’s just more technically precise to describe them as SiP, even if SoC functionally means something quite similar (and the language may evolve to the point where the terms are interchangeable in practice).
Ye the soldered ram is for sure making me doubt framework now.
Signal integrity is a real issue with dimm modules. It’s the same reason you don’t see modular VRAM on GPUs. If the ram needs to behave like VRAM, it needs to run at VRAM speeds.
Then don’t make it work like that. Desktop PCs are modular and Framework made a worse product in terms of modularity and repairability, the main sales of Framework. Just, like… wtf. This Framework product is cursed and shouldn’t exist.
There’s little point in framework selling a conventional desktop.
I guess they could have made another laptop size with the the dev time, but… I dunno, this seems like a niche that needs to be filled.
This is where I’m at. The Framework guy was talking about how very few companies are using this AMD deal because the R&D to add it to existing models wasn’t very viable, you really only have the Asus Z13 so I feel like being ahead of the game there will be a benefit in the long run as far as their relationship with AMD. Plus they’re also doing a 12-in laptop now as well, so it’s not like they committed all their resources to this.
Apparently AMD wasn’t able to make socketed RAM work, timings aren’t viable. So Framework has the choice of doing it this way or not doing it at all.
In that case, not at all is the right choice until AMD can figure out that frankly brain dead easy thing.
“brain dead easy thing”… All you need is to just manage signal integrity of super fast speed ram to a super hungry state of the art soc that benefits from as fast of memory as it can get. Sounds easy af. /s
They said that it was possible, but they lost over half of the speed doing it, so it was not worth it. It would severely cripple performance of the SOC.
The only real complaint here is calling this a desktop, it’s somewhere in between a NUC and a real desktop. But I guess it technically sits on a desk top, while also being an itx motherboard.
Oh yeah I’m sure you could’ve done it no problem
Not strange at all.
They’re a business that makes its money off of selling hype to morons.
Just buy a ThinkPad, if you’re thinking about buying a Framework…
Much like their laptops, I’m all for the idea, but what makes this desirable by those of us with no interest in AI?
I’m out of that loop though I get that AI is typically graphics processing heavy, can this be taken advantage of with other things like video rendering?
I just don’t know exactly what an AI CPU such as the Ryzen AI Max offers over a non-AI equivalent processor.
I hate how power hungry the regular desktop platform is so having capable APUs like this that will use less power at full load than a comparable CPU+GPU combo at idle, is great, though it needs to become a lot more affordable.
Much like their laptops
Its nothing like their laptops, thats the issue :/ Soldered in stuff all around, nonstandard parts that make it useless for use as a standard PC or gaming console.
Sorry, I was stating that “much like their laptops, I like the idea of these desktops.” I was not trying to insinuate that they themselves are alike.
There is a massive push right now for energy efficient alternatives to nvidia GPUs for AI/ML. PLENTY of companies are dumping massive amounts of money on macs and rapidly learning the lesson the rest of us learned decades ago in terms of power and performance.
The reality is that this is going to be marketed for AI because it has an APU which, keeping it simple, is a CPU+GPU. And plenty of companies are going to rush to buy them for that and a very limited subset will have a good experience because they don’t have time sensitive operations.
But yeah, this is very much geared for light-moderate gaming, video rendering, and HTPCs. That is what APUs are actually good for. They make amazing workstations. I could also see this potentially being very useful for a small business/household local LLM for stuff like code generation and the like but… those small scale models don’t need anywhere near these resources.
As for framework being involved: Someone has kindly explained to me that even though you have to replace the entire mobo to increase the amount of memory, you can still customize your side panels at any moment so I guess that is fitting the mission statement.
For modularity: There’s also modular front I/O using the existing USB-C cards, and everything they installed uses standard connectors.
what makes this desirable by those of us with no interest in AI?
Juat maybe not all products need to be for everyone.
Sometimes it’s fine if a product fits your label of “Not for me”.There’s lots of workstation niches that are gated by VRAM size, like very complex rendering, scientific workloads, image/video processing… It’s not mega fast, but basically this can do things at a reasonable speed that you’d normally need a $20K+ computer to even try.
That aside, the IGP is massively faster than any other integrated graphics you’ll find. It’s reasonably power efficient.
The Framework Desktop is powered by an AMD Ryzen AI Max processor, a Radeon 8060S integrated GPU, and between 32GB and 128GB of soldered-in RAM.
The CPU and GPU are one piece of silicon, and they’re soldered to the motherboard. The RAM is also soldered down and not upgradeable once you’ve bought it, setting it apart from nearly every other board Framework sells.
It’d raise an eyebrow if it was a laptop but it’s a freakin’ desktop. Fuck you framework.
Seriously that’s really disappointing. It really seems like investors decides that they needed to “diversify” their offering and they need something with AI now … Framework was on a good path imo but of course a repairable laptop only goes so far since people can repair it and don’t need to replace it every 2 years (or maybe just replace the motherboard) so if you want to grow you need to make more products …
I agree. We need less soldered RAM designs. I thought repairability was something they appreciated.
Honestly this is exactly the product I was waiting for minisforum to make. I think this is actually a pretty solid move.
Well tbh they still do have repairable laptops, even new ones and all that, and the “excuse” is that the only way to properly use that specific AMD CPU is with that specific RAM and the non.soldered bus wasn’t enough, but still… i’ll stick to old #ThinkPads, thank you.
insanely hostile response to something like this. they attempted to have these parts replaceable, AMD physically couldn’t do it. they’ve still made it as repairable as possible, and will without a doubt be more repairable than similar devices using this chipset. fucking relax, being reactionary without being informed is dumb.
We need to stop bending over backwards to lower our standards for the people making money off of us.
Have higher standards.
Don’t be a useful idiot.
You need to get a grip. Framework is a private company that has done very well by its customers and supporters so far. Stop being so fucking negative.
Oof, found the proud consumer.
They always get upset when you point out how they’re being taken advantage of.
They can never willingly take a bad deal, right? 😉
you seriously have issues. and you’re a dick on top of that.
you’re either a troll or just a shitty person.
Wow, calm down.
This is how you react when people say we should have higher standards? I guess you really are insecure about your purchasing habits.
The consumerism runs deep with you. Now you’re going to throw a tantrum trying to find ways to defend being taken for a ride 😎
will without a doubt be more repairable than similar devices
It’s a desktop, they’re repairable unless you solder something in.
using this chipset
They could’ve gone with any other chipset, making the whole thing irrelevant to begin with, but they couldn’t please the AI crowd that way.
By similar devices I obviously mean ITX PCs with similar chipsets. The average PC isn’t giving you 128GB of VRAM for $2k.
Local AI is a difficult thing to do right now, making a product to allow people to use AI without giving up their privacy is great.
I get the frustration with a system being so locked down, but if 32gb is the minimum I don’t really see the problem. This pc will be outdated before you really need to upgrade the ram to play new games.
It’s not just about upgrading. It’s also about being able to repair your computer. RAM likes to go bad and on a normal PC, you can replace it easily. Buy a cheap stick, take out the old RAM, put in the new one and you’ll have a working computer again. Quick & easy and even your grandpa is able to run Memtest and do a quick switch. But if you solder down everything, the whole PC becomes electronic waste as most people won’t be able to solder RAM.
Yeah, it totally fucks repairability. But it sounds like this is not something this company normally does, and not something they could control.
They should at least offer a superior warranty to cover such scenarios.
The hell you mean “not something they could control”? Their whole deal is making upgradeable, repairable devices and ram thats replaceable is no industry secret. Their options should have been make it work or dont make it at all.
If you read into it, this was a limitation on AMD’s part, which they tried to resolve. You don’t have to buy it, and the rest of their lineup should meet your expectations.
You know, they didn’t have to make a product with this specific chip. They did it anyway despite it being inherently incompatible with their former goals. And this is not about us customers, this is about Framework abandoning what they stood for and losing credibility in the process.
They kind of did. What other chip allows for 128 GB of VRAM or has that kind of iGPU?
🥱
I really hope this won’t be too expensive. If it’s reasonably affordable i might just get one for my living room.
they already announced pricing for them.
1099 for the base ai max model with 32gb(?), 1999 for fully maxed with the top sku.
With a cheeky comparison to Apples nearly $5k offering.
Bummer
$1k for the base isn’t horrible IMO, especially if you compare it to something like the mac mini starting at $600 and ballooning over $1k to increase to 32GB of “unified memory” and 1tb of storage.
I get why people are mad about the non-upgradable memory but tbh I think this is the direction the industry is going to go as a whole. They can’t get the memory to be stable and performant while also being removable. It’s a downside of this specific processor and if people want that they should just build a PC
And the “base” of this is physically more like a cut down M4 Pro than a regular M4.
i actually think its not the worst priced framework product ironically. Prebuilt 1k pcs tend to be something like a high end cpu + 4060 desktop anyways, so specs wise, its relatively speaking, reasonable. take for example cyberpower pcs build here, which is of the few oems iirc Gamers Nexus thinks doesn’t charge as much of a SI tax on assembly. it’s acutally not incredibly far off performance wise. I’d argue its the most value Framework product per dollar ironically.
Prebuilt 1k pcs tend to be something like a high end cpu + 4060 desktop anyways
That value proposition evaporates when you factor in repairability and upgradability of those prebuilts.
and if you actually want a PC for gaming on, a discrete gpu (eg: 7900xt) is going to be at least 3x faster at throwing polygons around than the 8060S. This thing is definitely better for AI workloads than gaming.
Xbox with the ability to run windows is what the article is basically saying.
Love the downvotes for saying something that is in the article! Feels just like reddit!
Or linux.
This thing makes a whole lot of pricey workstations obsolete.
What kind of workstations?
Any that needs a lot of VRAM and good CPU performance on a budget, but not necessarily the real time performance of a W7900 or whatever.
I think I need to give Linex a try again. I tried ubuntu in 2008 but found it too difficult to do the things I was used to doing on windows. I now have a bit more coding experience and will probably pick it up quicker
It’s gotten so much better since 2008. Ubuntu is good for servers, but probably not what you’re looking for on a desktop. And you really don’t need to have a coding background to use it, though it also depends on your use case.
I just recall trying to put music on an ipod in ubuntu was a nightmare
Probably still is, lol.
Apple stuff works best in the Apple ecosystem, though most of what works on Windows can work on linux.
You don’t have to pick and choose, you can dual boot.
But the only thing I boot Windows for these days is gaming and Microsoft Teams. Linux has come a long way since 2008.
teams online client is good enough, too
