While I don’t own a Framework I welcome this change and find it quite interesting, partly because it seems like every laptop and PC maker these days are putting an ALC chip on their boards. You also don’t see computer companies announcing “we’re ditching chip X for chip Y” often and this is very informative transparency.
It feels like Realtek puts a lot of red tape around its chips. Most notably, it’s very hard to look up a datasheet for an ALC chip unless it’s a very popular part. Realtek also seem to only provide stock and support to their biggest customers like Dell and Gigabyte, because it sounds like Framework struggled to secure stock, probably from a one-off source, for their first batches and couldn’t get in touch with Realtek to implement the Smart DSP feature.
The Tempo chip on their other hand is much more open. The datasheet is right on the product page, and the chip has first-class Linux support. In the integrated sound card market where Realtek is to codec as Clorox is to bleach, I welcome attempts to diversify the market share.