What's the story with AMD's Zen 4 / RDNA 3 APUs, are they coming out?
Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more
361–370 of 491 posts
Re: Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
The $449 Intel 1340p or AMD Ryzen mainboard seems to be attractively priced against other barebones mini PCs and the Mac Mini too!
It is nevertheless a laptop part, which compromises performance for battery consumption (with much lower clocks). You might not want this if you value performance to the dollar more than some wall power.
In this form factor, the use of laptop grade parts is quite common. So, if you want a small PC, then you’re already going to be comfortable with this level of performance. In this case, reuse of a framework main board is a great option.
Re: Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm also intrigued by the business opportunities of providing more ways for fans to spend money than just buying a new laptop every 4 years. If I can upgrade to a new mainboard and turn my old one into a functional desktop, I'm much more likely to add in a $500 mainboard upgrade at the 2 year mark.
This is exactly what I did when the 12th gen came out. My original mainboard is now running our home NAS and NVR.
I'd love to learn more about how you used your mainboard for a nas. What did you house it in?
Re: Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more
#364Re: Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more
#365I bought a 12th-gen Intel Framework last summer when they first came out. Aside from some thermal throttling issues (that are actually kinda bad and common, and Framework support has been so far unable to address), and so-so battery life, I'm otherwise happy with it, after I got used to the screen's odd aspect ratio and made my peace with it being a physically larger machine because of that. (I'm assuming the driver…
> One cool small detail on the 16" is they've dropped the built-in 3.5mm jack and added two more expansion card ports, with one of the options being a card with a 3.5mm jack. Really smart move there; satisfies both camps of people who want and don't want that jack.
Normally this would annoy me a bit, but my 11th-gen has always had a bit of annoying line noise coming over the headphone jack anyway, so being able to break the whole of that out into USB is actually a compromise I'm more than willing to make. (Also I lol'd IRL at the riff on "courage.") But then again, my hot take on phones for a while has been that I'd rather have two USB ports than one headphone jack, so this is pretty firmly in line with that.
> I think the thing that is most encouraging is that it does seem like they're trying to settle into a yearly cadence for new mainboard releases, tracking the latest chipsets from Intel (and hopefully now from AMD too). I was a little worried that they wouldn't be able to keep up, since they're still a small-ish company. Certainly not going to buy the 13th-gen or new Ryzen boards this year, but it's good to know that, assuming the company continues to be successful, I should be able to upgrade in a couple years.
My guess is that would actually be less of a problem in this context, given that the the form factor is stable from year to year and they can just ship upgrades for individual components instead of making whole new devices on an annual basis.
Re: Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
As one of the QMK Firmware maintainers, it's great to see you're going ahead with the customisable side of things even on the input side. Might I suggest engaging with QMK early so that we can avoid the usual manufacturer "hey can you merge this, we've shipped already and forgot to raise the PR until now"?
Absolutely! We’ve been chatting with Jack Humbert, and he’s actually been prototyping an ortholinear keyboard module for the Framework Laptop 16. There are likely some photos of it in press articles about the event today.
Just take my money already
Re: Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more
#367They made a blog post on it. Probably better than linking to their homepage https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop-16-...
@dang
Re: Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
We’ve opened the specs specifically to avoid this scenario! The information we have up on GitHub today is enough to get started on module development, and we’ll share any additional information that is useful to enable third party board makers.
My concern is more about business than technical factors. The NRE for such a module is going to be significant so the addressable market needs to be pretty big to justify it. Third-party modules could also get killed off by first-party ones that come later.
Third-party modules could also get killed off by first-party ones
I think it is pretty clear that Framework intends to allow you to buy the most barebones laptop you can. I mean they let you buy 0 of the little cartridge modules, I assume they won't force people to buy one of these PCIex8 modules.
Re: Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more
#369I'm really happy with my HUAWEI keyboard. It has no wasted space and great backlighting and great touch. I like it much better than any other keyboard like Logitech etc. Small but not too small.
It is small enough to carry around but still "full-size". No numeric keypad but I don't really need one.
So if I needed a laptop I imagine I would get one which can flip to just the display in a tent-mode and then I would carry my keyboard separately. I never liked any laptop keyboard much. I could move and position this keyboard optimally which you can not do with a fixed laptop keyboard.
Here's a link to their website.
https://consumer.huawei.com/en/accessories/ultrathin-keyboar...
Re: Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more
#370I hope these guys hang in there for the long haul. Because right now it seems to be for enthusiasts since there is only US keyboard and expected shipping i Q3.
I'm happy with my current laptop but at some point I'm going to need a new one so it feels great that there are so many amazing options out there. I just hope that at some point when I need that new laptop I'll be able to order one within a few weeks and my language on the keyboard.