Framework's first desktop is a strange–but unique–mini ITX gaming PC

There is security.

The other things is bug-fixing. The way it currently works is that bugs often only get fixed for one version and other issues like that.

Getting this stuff open and having upstream heavy fixing of bugs will imporve the ecosystem.

The other things is performance. Faster boot times are quite nice.

The other things is being able to better play with more advanced boot security concepts, booting with Bluetooth/NFC verification and so on.

And once its open, and you can more easily work with it, and its more available, hopefully more people do more interesting work with it.

That said, its not an absolute priority for me, but its just a better long term solution. So companies that push it are a big plus.

I'd say that after numerous revelations in regards to UEFI vulnerabilities and such, an open source BIOS / EFI has become a necessity for me rather than something just nice to have.

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.

just an anecdata but recently I was building a HTPC/NAS. Initially I wanted N100 for pure NAS, but ended up with an 5500 AMD and I was blown away by the capabilities of IGPU. Turned out to be a quite capable gaming machine.

Well, different people are fascinated by different things. :) I hope both products are successful, they've been (so far) a force for good in the industry as far as I can tell.

Definitely! ROCm is getting really solid for inference. LM Studio (and therefore the underlying llama.cpp) work out of the box already, and we see AMD pushing forward on PyTorch and other areas rapidly.

I have the framework 16, and ROCm has been driving me nuts. The GPU in the 16 isn’t as meant for AI, but just shockingly bad

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 had a coat with large side pockets just big enough to fit the 11" air. Not that I would ever use them for that, but it sure felt nice to have the option...

What OS? My air can't upgrade and is out of space with like nothing installed. Curious if still macos or something else, now.

what about the Snapdragon? Microsoft is using in their ARM laptops

So they're exactly like the gaming PC community. "Decibels aren't a benchmark", as an enthusiast acquaintance says. If you want to go fanless, you need to go to a silent PC community. Where their forums is actively hostile--even brutal--to people who do want a fan.

There are a lot of more or less weird, very dedicated, very opinionated subcultures in the PC hardware world.

Snapdragon X series are far from ass. Most programs work. Even ancient stuff.

You mean this?

https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard

Yeah I’m thinking it’s at least a few years off. But it’ll get better eventually. Framework is already on the RISCV train, so I have no doubt when a good RISCV SoC is available it’ll be in a framework ASAP. I’m hoping by the time my current 16 is feeling slow the RISCV option will be the obviously best choice

Linux on arm is actually pretty terrible outside of the server space due to their (Qualcomm, Imagination, and ARM) integrated GPUs being bad and having terrible drivers.

Is Windows on ARM still immature? I'd think with the Microsoft Surface (ARM processors for several years now) that Windows on ARM would be fine but I've never owned or used one so I don't have any anecdotal evidence, just my assumptions.

Well now I've given up, they've told me I need to buy a new mainboard because it's "out of warranty" which is crap since I've been complaining about it since I bought it.

Good! Strange that their photos don't show this off. Lenovo ad-spend showcasing tablet mode was enormous.

https://frame.work/laptop12

It's sort of obvious if you've seen the Panasonic implementation like in CF-RZ line, it's the same setup. The top and bottom halves are connected through a pair of square pieces long as the laptop's thickness. Hinges each articulate 180 degrees to total 360 degrees to allow it to fold like a human knee joint.

The four hinges must stay synchronized under lift force from the user, but I haven't seen that being a problem on a Let's note, so it's probably good.

The 13" display panel is like an L shape where the short goes in between the left & right sides chassis. That'd be modifying a lot.

Mine shipped with a WD Black, so I'm not hopeful but it's worth considering, if I end up sticking with this hardware.

>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...

Definitely. My last self built desktop ($8k total in 2012-ish) lasted a decade under heavy use like M/ECAD and compiling stuff, with only a midlife upgrade from SSD to NVME. When you buy top of the line cutting edge parts that are binned for overclocking, they remain competitive for a very long time, especially now that we’ve hit diminishing returns. Now all you need to make sure is that it’s got enough PCIe lanes if going to a performance build. I only retired the desktop because of how much power it burns and our electricity rates going up here in SoCal.

That 64gb OCed 3200 (maybe 3500) mHz DDR3 RAM for example, kept up with DDR4 speeds for most of that decade when I benchmarked every few years. Intel extreme processor, workstation motherboard, and GTX Titans also kept chugging along. I’ve been looking at some of the higher end DDR5 coming down the pipeline and those are also likely to be on the higher end of performance for a decade while the consumer parts catch up. The only problem is that the workstation motherboard market seems to have disappeared.

(This was a work computer for my consulting)

The difference is that The Ship of Theseus had all its parts replaced one by one, in a long period of time. If you replace 90% of the ship at the same time (RAM, CPU and Motherboard), then the analogy breaks down.

That is not a framework choice, that is an AMD architecture that doesn't use regular RAM modules as it requires wider data bus

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)

Apparently this is due to signal integrity. AMD says swappable RAM is not possible. Source: LinusTechTips video.

Apparently LPCAMM2 (brand new upgradable RAM) modules wont support 256 bits width soon.

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.

Apparently that AMD CPU isnt even compatible with CAMM2 because of technical reasons. Framework CEO explained it in LinusTechTips video.

It's on package memory that AMD sells bundled to OEMs.

> really important for running things like LLMs

and games, having really speedy/low latency memory helps a lot with being competitive to some mid range dedicated GPUs

Bandwidth to a GPU from a socketed RAM? How?

> 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.

Compared to the most popular alternative (mac mini / mac studio), it's still way more inline with the framework mission.

You can still buy the motherboard version and use your own case and PSU. That's better than not just the macs, but also many other mini PCs.

And considering the chip, it's still the most modular way to buy a Ryzen 395 for the foreseeable future.

I think their ethos is more about being user- and developer- friendly.

RAM upgrades at reasonable prices, being able to buy the main board sans case, and supporting multiple OSes all point in that direction, without strictly being modular

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.

They saw an underserved niche and went for it. Based on the wait time for their site seems to be working for them.

They just got me as a new customer with this AI miniPC. It's the first Framework product I've bought.

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.

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.

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.

The 12 isn't even up for preorder, but its landing page is gated by Cloudflare all the same.

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.

According to Framework, CAMM / LPCAMM is simply not compatible with this line of AMD chips, do to signal integrity reasons.

CAMM will be fine on laptops and other smaller form factor devices for CPU-class memory speeds, but it does not have the bus width or lanes to match solutions like Strix Halo, Grace, Apple M-series -- the memory bandwidth being a large part of their appeal. Increasing the bus width on CAMM modules is going to compromise many of the other advantages.

The problem is that these are integrated shared-memory systems with a single RAM pool. That's nice for a lot of reasons, but GPUs need many more memory channels and larger bus widths than CPUs do in order to do work and remain fed at a reasonable power draw. It's an inherent design trade off. I don't see a CAMM style solution for GPU memory coming anytime soon except on the low end.

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.

Nvidia Grace is DDR5, hopper is HBM. Many servers like Intel and AMD's latest and greatest all use DDR5.

But no published memory bandwidth.

True, but less RAM.

Ryzen PRO SKU would enable these security features, https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen-pro/...?

  Virtualization: interrupts, vIOMMU, nested paging, GMET, SLAT
  Security: memory encryption, Windows Device Guard, VBS, Secured Core
  Management: DASH for rack/cluster

I'm aware of all the limitations they've brought up and how it was sold to the public. It's not as if someone forced them to build this product. They've chosen to build it this way.

This product goes against their principles of building products which are more environmentally friendly. They've done this for the laptops by not forcing people to buy a new laptop when their motherboard is dead or no longer fast enough for the software they run. It's also possible to replace the keyboard, the hinge, the battery, the RAM, the wifi module, the SSD, the touchpad, the case, the display and the expansion modules.

This Framework Desktop 1st gen can have the following components replaced: wifi, SSD, CPU fan, maybe the heatsink, some front panel IO modules, some decorative tiles on the front, the PSU and some parts of the case. A single broken regulator or failing memory chip forces the owner to replace the entire computer. One is forced to replace the entire thing if they have no option to get someone to find the relevant part, desolder the existing one and solder the new one on. This is also not an option for the CPU.

This means that any kind of damage forces the owner to buy another board with CPU and RAM soldered on it for about the same price as the entire thing with the case.

This Framework Desktop computer can be repaired just like most laptops with soldered RAM by replacing the entire motherboard with CPU and RAM. Why would I downgrade the desktop PC's repairability down to that of a laptop? The tradeoff isn't worth it for that price.

It is indeed better than the Mac. It's still 1000 times worse than a regular desktop PC which lets people swap RAM modules, the CPU, add a dGPU and so on.

Thanks for the answers. I prepurchased one now out of FOMO, though I'm still trying to figure out if I need to cancel the order or if I can trust that I'll actually be able to run stuff on it.

Regarding LLMs, am I going to be able to run quantized models? Doesn't have to support all quantization methods, but at least one of the popular quantization methods would need to work (e.g. GGUF or EXL2). I ask this because quantized models provide the most "bang for buck" in LLMs.

Regarding image generation, in real workflows there is typically a lot of dependencies (much more than in LLMs, and much more than in toy examples for image generation). I'm wondering how many of these dependencies will in practice be limited to NVIDIA and CUDA. For example, if you grab some popular ComfyUI Flux workflow from Reddit, are you able to actually run that on Framework Desktop?

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.

Except, you know, the entire dynamic functionality of purchasing everything. Taht can't be cached.

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()

They could have added a 16 lane upstream, 32 lane downstream PLX switch to packet switch between those devices.

>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.)