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Comment by WhyNotHugo | Hacker News Reader

I don’t quite get why framework focuses so much on Intel and AMD. ARM laptops are in the rise, and don’t need active cooling. It’s hard for me to think of upgrading to another laptop with fans when so many fanless (I.e.: silent) options are available.

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To the best of my knowledge the ARM ecosystem is an absolute pain to work in, you can get Phone/Tablet SoCs painfully encumbered with out of date drivers and binary blobs. Or you can get enormous server processors that will cost $1000+. There just isn't much that's suitable for making a desktop or laptop that would meet Frameworks markets expectations.

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

Linux support remains problematic.

Painfully encumbered with binary blobs and out of date drivers (that is, out of tree hacked in kernel drivers that will never be ported to mainline)

And even Microsoft is dealing with pain points like Qualcomm he, few, and drivers actually breaking the spec and causing problems in servicing and supporting the ARM based devices.

Meanwhile properly SBSA compliant chips aren't targeted at mobile market at all and thus often lack certain features or are too energy hungry.

> ARM laptops are in the rise, and don’t need active cooling.

ARM has nothing to do with being fanless or not, that's just whether or not you're happy with what 15w can get you or not.

Not many people are, which is why ARM laptops with fans are just if not even more common than ones without.

Also there's a single ARM SoC that isn't garbage at this power/performance bracket on the open market, and it's embattled with legal troubles (Qualcomm vs. ARM over Snapdragon X Elite). And while the X Elite CPU is great, the GPU and software for things like video deciding are bad and break regularly

Because AMD chips achieve ARM efficiency without dealing with ARM compatibility mess.

They don't seem to care about needing a fan, and the community on their forums is actively hostile--even brutal--to people who don't want a fan (the zeitgeist there seems to believe that any compromise to performance at all costs is incompetence). It is particularly frustrating as you don't even have to go ARM to drop the fan: there are chips even from Intel that do not need fans, such as any of the ones in all of the 12" laptops I have used for the past dozen or so years (including the one I am using right now, which also happens to have a much much better screen than this new Framework: a Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 360, whose only flaw is it doesn't have enough RAM).

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.

> So they're exactly like the gaming PC community. "Decibels aren't a benchmark", as an enthusiast acquaintance says.

wut? Gamers love to pay extra for a tiny bit of less noise. Noctua and expensive water cooled systems are widespread in the gaming community.

The issue is kind of on the other side, though: you can pay more to improve your cooling in a way that might be quieter or better; but, if you absolutely do not want any fan noise--nor any fragile mechanical motors to move air/water/oil/ether/whatever--you get to a point where money can't buy better cooling... you simply have to put up with less cooling, with less powerful chips that have lower thermal bounds and often simply aren't fast. Like, I don't buy a computer because it is fast, and as soon as a company starts telling me how fast their computer is I start bemoaning the lost battery life and certainty of a noisy active cooling solution that I don't want :(.

I recall a video from Gamers Nexus at a trade event, though only that it was sometime roughly within the last year.

Entirely passive (I THINK / recall there was no pump), heat based circulation, with just TONS of radiator surface and an unwieldy design. However for that entirely custom solution they could theoretically scale up with additional size.

Still, if someone's going _that_ overboard, the heat's getting dumped somewhere.

'Industrial Chilled Water' as in a connection to an external (to the room, maybe even building) pump, and an external cooler (usually evaporative cooling, could be mega radiators in the shade too) like you see at industrial sites.

Totally fair, but I'd argue the water-cooled crowd is another, distinct sub-culture with it's own goals (e.g. silent is nice, but getting the highest overclock is nicer). Just like the nitrogen cooled and SLIC guys are scratching a slightly different itch. And, FWIW...there's probably 10 Noctuas within 20' of me; they are wonderfully quiet, but I think those calling them 'silent' are not quite accurate, YMMV.

Strix Point AMD laptop CPUs are just better than non-Apple ARM CPUs across the board, and don't have the whole host of compatibility issues. There isn't really any point to them.

You trade no incidental fan noise and better idle power for ass performance and "too bad this app you used for years doesn't work". I don't think that's even close to a good deal.

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

Do you have a "benchmark program" for performance and results for it? (e.g. I like to wall-clock measure a clean build of LLVM to approximate the performance on the compute-heavy workloads I run often.)

I hear you: would love to see a RISC-V-based system without all the downsides to using ARM. Perhaps in another 3-5 years we'll see performance parity and it'll be viable. If we get close it certainly seems like we'll see a laptop from Framework using such a chip.

You mean this?

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

no. that's a dev board with ~rasberry pi 3 performance.

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

They are a fairly small company, and going for amd/intel means reaching the widest audience.

Linux on arm is very mature, but windows on arm not completely.

That being said, other companies could very well develop and sell boards for the frameworks laptop. So much so that iirc sifive did release a risc-v laptop board to use in the frameworks laptop case.

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.

My brother is on the Windows side of the world (MS partner and all that, lots of CRM/DB work). He said if you stick to mainstream apps (MS apps, Adobe, etc) ARM is basically on parity with x86, tho not the performance choice. He said these days he rarely has customers come with support issues that boil down to "bug only occurs on ARM", though "it's slow on ARM" does come up. OTOH...If you have specialty/niche apps that you rely on, or apps from a small dev who doesn't have the resources to support 2 archs, your mileage may vary.

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.

Qualcomm doesn't belong in the list, Freedreno and Turnip are feature complete open source GPU drivers.

There's no ARM GPU on par with AMD's integrated GPU in the 300 series. The ARM CPU also among the top, trading blows with the M3 Max. Plus you can avoid the compatibility mess that is ARM on the desktop...

The problem is with ARM itself, who is trying to drown out the other licensees in the space, but then can't deliver a good enough product.

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