Hacker News Reader

Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a shame they went with 2 year old 13th gen Intel processors for these. The newer Lunar Lake Intel chips have much better battery life and thermals, and you can find them in other similarly priced laptops. The main downside is that Lunar Lake chips have soldered on RAM, but given that Framework already sells a desktop with soldered RAM that shouldn't be a dealbreaker for them.

View on HN

For their marketing it is. There is a very specific reason the desktop exists. On-premise AI workloads. You can't get the bus width on socketed ram that you do soldered ram at the current moment. 1 product is an exception, 2 would be a break from their replaceable component marketing.

It used to be that CPU and GPU were separate cards/chips, nowadays they are often integrated. There are good reasons to solder-in RAM. Yes it's a tradeoff, but it's reasonable. I don't expect FW to revert technical decisions that are not under their control. Mostly, I just don't want to be buying whole new laptop because my keyboard had a defect, or I cracked my screen. If the compute module comes with a soldered RAM, it's perfectly fine with me. For most most of my systems I buy it with RAM maxed-out, and when I get a new one, there's typically new generation of DDR, new speeds, etc. and I will not reuse my old RAM. I'm fine with buying and replacing a new CPU + RAM module as a unit, and I would buy such a module. The fact that there are modules with external memory is already enough good faith commitment to repairability.

Selling a laptop with soldered ram might literally kill the company at this stage. Their entire brand and market is based on repairability.

From your careful word choice you know this but I'd like to draw attention to the specifics here. I'm not sure if it's actually soldered on but RAM is on-package like apple's M-series chips, unlike what used to be the case where soldering ram to the board was a choice made by the laptop mfgs.

Here's there's no choice to be made other than not using the chips. And unfortunately (although there are some benefits), it's probably not going to be just a few generations but a trend for high end processors going forward.

It is actually one of the few cases where I don't actually really care about independent upgradability. In my experience I find that I pretty much always upgrade my CPU and my RAM in tandem. New CPU architectures sometimes force it (e.g. need DDR5 instead of DDR4), and as long as you don't severely undersize your initial RAM choice I find that I run out of CPU headroom before I run out of RAM headroom.

So if there's performance gains to be had by co-locating RAM with the CPU in a single package, it makes sense to me to do so

> and as long as you don't severely undersize your initial RAM choice

That's the problem though. when dealing with used machines (because new ones are beyond your budget), you get cheaper hand me downs, and those are going to be of your undersized RAM variety. In the socketed days, you could get a five year old laptop, replace the existing RAM with the biggest sticks you cloud get your hands on, and get a few more years of life out of the machine. A laptop stuck at four gigs of ram these days isn't going to be great for much web browsing, but is also basically stuck at four gigs.

Unless Foundation always uses the current generation CPU, then this complaint is always valid. Or maybe invalid.

Thermals and energy consumption are almost always improving between generations. It's hard for me to think of 13th generation as old. Maybe I'm getting old!

The reason why I brought it up was that Lunar Lake was specifically designed to make an x86 offering that has comparable battery life with chips from Qualcomm and Apple. It's not a standard marginal generational improvement, for light office tasks (the type of use case this laptop is intended for) you get around 17 hours of battery life vs the previous generation's 10 hours (see benchmark results here: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2463714/tested-intels-lunar-... ).

I wanted to understand if any other cpu generations had comparable gains over the previous, but I need to work on an Intel ark scraper. Maybe I'll find some time to post it back here on HN. Thanks for added details

It's not surprising, Meteor Lake and onwards are all TSMC and unlike Intel they still actually know how to manufacture chips. Arc iGPUs are also a massive improvement over Iris.

It's not just a TSMC vs. Intel thing, Lunar Lake gets 7 more hours of battery life than Meteor Lake when doing the same "light office tasks" benchmark.

Ok that part is surprising, Meteors already draw very little, like < 25W unless turbo boosting and 6W idling. What kind of wattage does Lunar have?

The numbers I've seen show that the peak power draw is similar to Meteor Lake, but it generally draws ~40% less than Meteor Lake when doing the same task. The SoC only idle power draw figures I've seen are 0.62W for Lunar Lake vs. 2.32W for Meteor Lake.

Do the math on "6W idling". That's terrible for SoC energy draw. For modern expectations of battery life the SoC has to be in the milliwatt range.

Yeah I complained about this on the framework subreddit when I first heard of the FW12, asking for reasons and expectedly got downvoted into oblivion. Apparently expecting them to use something mildly recent is too much to ask for and it's supposed to be a cheapshit student laptop aimed at schools or whatever. Wouldn't be as bad if it weren't Intel's worst CPU gen in recent memory, FW probably got a bargain box deal on them.

Meanwhile the HX370 is still warm from the oven and already in the FW13, linux drivers aren't even ready yet with compatibility complaints aplenty. Not to mention the FW Desktop with the AI Max which was the first launch of that chipset worldwide.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com