201–210 of 464 posts
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Supporting OSS and repairable hardware?
A normal desktop with non-soldered components is more repairable, cheaper and can also run on stock Linux? The only selling point is the form factor and a massive amount of GPU memory, but a dGPU offers more raw compute.
All those SteamOS handhelds are on AMD.
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Was scoffing at HP, but then you got my attention with ECC RAM. Looks nice as well.
Keep scoffing, it's not real end to end ECC, just "link" ecc, which is just part of the chip -> CPU pipeline. So it's not full ECC like servers have with dimms with a multiple of 9 chips with ECC protecting everything from the dimms to the CPU. Keep in mind the ram is inside the strix halo package, not something HP has control over.
I was baffled by the comparison to the M4 Max. Does this mean that recent AMD chips will be performing at the same level, and what does that mean for on-device LLMs? .. or am I misunderstanding this whole ordeal?
Not in perf/watt but perf, yes.
edit: Though the M4 Max may be more power hungry than I'm giving it credit, but it's hard to say because I can't figure out if some of these power draw metrics from random Internet posts actually isolate the M4 itself. It looks like when the GPU is loaded it goes much, much higher.
https://old.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/1hkhtpp/m4_max_...
RDNA 3.5, which means you don't get Matrix Cores. Those are reserved for RDNA 4, which comes to laptop chips later this year. Desktop RDNA 4 only shipped in 2025. For comparison, Nvidia brought Tensor Cores to consumer cards in 2022 with the 4000 series and Apple had simdgroup_matrix since 2020! We are moving towards a world where this hardware is ubiquitous. It's uncertain what that means for non-ML workloads.
What do you need Matrix Cores for when you already have a NPU which can access the same memory, and even seems to include more flexible FPGA fabric? It's six of one, half a dozen of another.
I was baffled by the comparison to the M4 Max. Does this mean that recent AMD chips will be performing at the same level, and what does that mean for on-device LLMs? .. or am I misunderstanding this whole ordeal?
Yes, the Strix series of AMD uses a similar architecture as M series with massive memory bandwidth and big caches. That results in significantly better performance.
I like Framework and own one of their laptops. But the desktop seems more a triumph of gimmicky marketing than a desktop that's meaningfully different. And, it seems significantly overpriced.
If you can't find an sufficiently similar alternative that is priced at a much better price, it is not overpriced.
I like Framework and own one of their laptops. But the desktop seems more a triumph of gimmicky marketing than a desktop that's meaningfully different. And, it seems significantly overpriced.
If you can't find an sufficiently similar alternative that is priced at a much better price, it is not overpriced.
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It's taking a newly released mobile- and mini-PC-focused platform that's usually paired with proprietary technology, and building something that's as close as possible to a standard desktop with it. Seems very much in the Framework spirit once you account for that side of it.
Right, but why go with mobile at all? I get the laptops. For desktop you already have thousands of choices though and reparability, assuming its not some proprietary Dell/HP desktop, is already as good as it gets without breaking out your soldering iron. That said, they'll know more about the market demand than I do and another option won't hurt :)
Strix Halo is almost like having a PS5 or Xbox chip but available for the PC ecosystem. It's a super interesting and unique part for GPU compute, AI, or small form factor gaming.
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OSS is fair. From the product page I don't see how that mainboard is more repairable than a typical ITX one though. As far as I can tell, you also cannot change the CPU on it so even less than a typical desktop mainboard.
By buying their devices you directly support company and mission that they're on. I'm not a diehard OSS supporter (Mac user here), but I consider buying The Framework Desktop just to support the company over, say, Dell or HP.
Exactly. Between those three companies, only one of them is likely to even try to make something like core boot possible on this machine. That’s something I can afford to encourage.
> In some ways, the Framework Desktop is a curious machine. Desktop PCs are already very user-repairable! So why is Framework even bringing their talents to this domain? In the laptop realm, they're basically alone with that concept, but in the desktop space, it's rather crowded already. Yet it somehow still makes sense. And even more curious, Framework Desktop is deliberately less repairable than their laptops. They…
Even on regular AMD 7000 and 9000 series the DDR5 memory controller is very sensitive and hard to get a stable system with fast RAM on many motherboards when all 4 modules are present. At today's RAM speeds, I definitely think a stable soldered system is increasingly a better trade-off.
* ASUS X870E ROG CROSSHAIR HERO AMD AM5 ATX Motherboard