The Framework Desktop is a beast
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Wow, someone managed to beat Apple on price??
I don't know that it logically follows that anything is a great deal when it undercuts Apple. Half sounds about right -- I thought Apple was a bit more competitive these days than ×2 actually, but apparently not, also considering that Framework comes with a (totally fair) niche-vendor premium
It’s absolutely ridiculous given how cheap 1TB or 2TB drives are. And generally, in my experience, the ones Apple uses have had subpar performance compared to what’s available for the PC market for less than half the price. Not to mention their base configuration machines usually have subtly crappier SSDs than a tier up.
I haven’t bought a new Mac since Apple released the M-series. I’ve wanted to multiple times, but the value just isn’t there for me personally.
Sure, Macs should not be so restricted but unless government take action, that's not going to happen.
> How to Replace the SSD in your Mac mini (2024)
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Replace+the+SSD+in+your+...
> Apple integrates the storage controllers into the Apple Silicon SoC, which means that normal M.2 SSDs are incompatible.
They just don't need to include a SSD controller, since that is already built into the SOC.
iMacs and macbook pros on the other hand are significantly more difficult. Apple could easily rectify this but choose not to, so that you are more likely to buy their overpriced upsells on the initial purchase.
External drives are not a replacement for internal drives. I have a laptop for a reason, and on crowded trains and planes needing some desk space to plug in dongles, huibs, and external drives just doesnt cut it.
They charge $600 CAD to go from 16GB -> 32 GB.
They charge $900 CAD for 512 GB -> 2 TB SSD.
The SSD is user replaceable, so you can replace it with a cheaper third party option.
> How to Replace the SSD in your Mac mini (2024)
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Replace+the+SSD+in+your+...
This guide is purely instructional for how to replace the SSD with another of the same type.
They do only charge $214 CAD ($156 USD) to 512 GB → 2 TB SSD, thanks to it just being an NVMe stick.
That doesn't seem accurate for any of their computers? There is a pretty big leap from 32GB -> 64GB for the Desktop, but that is also a different processor.
- Framework, Max+ 64GB: $2,861.16
- Apple Mini M4 Pro, 64GB: $2,899.00
Apple does charge way too much for integrated storage, but Apple is only a 25% premium at 2TB not double (if you compare to the mini instead of the studio). Plug in a NVMe SSD if you're building an Apple desktop.
I would hazard a guess and say: at that spec, if you're looking at 1Y TCO, the Apple could easily be cost competitive performance per dollar.
Since they're in spitting distance of each other, just get the one you're most comfortable with. Personally I prefer Linux and I'm really happy that non-Apple machines are starting to get closer to the same efficiency and performance!
The used market for high performance PC gear is quite efficient. You're not going to get a high-end CPU or GPU from the past several years for pennies on the dollar.
Likewise, the resale market for Apple products doesn't guarantee 50% or more unless you're only looking at resale value of very new hardware. For example, you can pick up an M1 Max MacBook Pro (not that old) for closer to 1/3 of the original price.
Seems odd to me. Most computers I've ever had last for ~10 years, at which point resale value is definitely zero...
From a purely financial perspective buying a computer or vehicle brand new is a very bad idea.
The two systems aren't that different in power consumption. The Strix Halo part has a 55W default TDP but I would assume Framework customized it to be higher. A comparable M4 Pro Mac Mini can easily pull 80W during an AI workload.
Apple has a slight edge in power efficiency, but it's not going to make a massive difference.
Only if you're buying artesinal single source electricity sustainably sourced from trained dolphins.
Average US electrical power is $.18/kWh per google. Figure the desktop draws 300W continuous (which it almost certainly can't), and that's 0.3 kW * 24 hr/day * 365.2425 days/yr == $473/year. So even if the mac was completely free you'd be looking at crossover in 5 years, or longer than the expected life of the device.
I understand if you say that high-performance users will want a newer system after 5 years, but I'd be very surprised if this 64GB RAM machine doesn't suffice for 98% of people, including those who want to play then-common games at default settings
Good to have some concrete figures nonetheless of course, it's always useful as a starting point
But even so: I'm not sure I know a single new-device Apple customer who has a single unit older than five years. The comment about power implied that you'd make up the big Mac price tag on power savings, and no, you won't, not nearly, before you hawk it on eBay to buy another.
[1] And also that you posit that the device is in a compute farm or something and pumped at full load 24/7. Average consumption for real development hardware (that spends 60% of its life in suspend and 90% of the remainder in idle) is much, much, much closer to zero than it is to 300W!
Granted this is also the case of many brands but I found it was easier to find old thinkpad, fujitsu and dell business laptops in good shape than it was to find Apple ones.
Maybe this is biased and it has more to do with professional vs personal use. I guess you are a bit more cautious with a laptop your employer is lending you.
Huh? I'm not "positing" anything, I'm responding to the longevity you stated:
> you'd be looking at crossover in 5 years, or longer than the expected life of the device.
As for Apple users not having devices older than five years... ehm, yeah: the brand targets an audience that really likes shiny new toys (either because they're lured into thinking they need it, or because it's a status symbol for them). Not sure how that's relevant here though
While Apple does charge nearly criminal markup for RAM and storage, they at least make some products that last (except for the TouchBar MacBooks' keyboards). I just hope my Mac Studio lasts too.
Nah, everything works forever, it's just that no one cares. My younger child retired a 3770K Ivy Bridge box last year that I'd bought at or near release in 2012, so ~11 years of steady use.
People fetishize Apple hardware, but the truth is that modern electronics manufacturing is bulletproof up and down the assembly lines.
I've also had high wattage GPUs inexplicably fail and lost a few SSDs to unexpected catastrophic failure. TBF I haven't lost any halfway decent SSDs within the past 5 years.
I don't think I've ever lost a motherboard, CPU, or RAM though. Even secondhand recycled data center stuff. It seems to just keep working forever.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772
They do sometimes end up supporting devices for longer than this, but you can't rely on it.
Corporations are switching laptops on a 3-year cycle.
Next year, there will be a flood of M2s, in 2 years, M3s, 3 years, M4s, nada, nada.
He didn't pick the equivalent Mac to compare to. The closest Mac would be a an M4 Pro Mac Mini, not a Mac Studio.
Right now I see a 64GB M4 Pro Mac Mini with 2TB SSD is $2600. Still more expensive, but not double the price. The Apple refurbished store has the same model for $2200.
The M4 Pro Mac Mini probably has the edge in performance, though I can't say how much. The Ryzen platform driver and software support is still early.
I think these Strix Halo boxes are great, but I also think they're a little high in the hype cycle right now. Once supply and demand evens out I think they should be cheaper, though.
You have to admit this reads as grade A cope.
Is it that hard to acknowledge that Apple price gouges all their product line?
That's getting you twice the RAM for the same price. Now the Framework has both intangible cool factor and scope for more upgrades, so if money is no object, get the Framework.
But I can vouch for the EVO-X2 as the real Strix Halo experience: its thermals are solid, and even under sustained 100W+ its quieter than the average gaming PC. Obviously an elite ITX build can do better, but it's jaw-dropping at the price point: great ports, plenty of M.2 capacity, stable under extreme load, and a lot cheaper.
Well played sir! <3
I would love it if PC was in a better state, but ever since Intel started flopping everyone in the PC land is praising AMD while ignoring the fact that both of them are just underdelivering compared to Apple. You cannot even get a consumer grade CPU on PC with >128 bit memory bus other than this strix halo chip - and it happened by accident. There is nothing on roadmap in the mainstream that will bump it - industry is years away from adding it. Meanwhile Apple is benefiting from this since M1, and the AI workloads just made it an even larger win.
This is why they went with the “laptop” cpu. While it’s slightly slower than dedicated memory, it allows you to run the big models, at decent token speeds.
I understand it's faster but still...
Did they at least do an internal PSU if they went the Apple way or does it come with a power brick twice the size of the case?
Edit: wait. They do have an internal PSU! Goodness!
https://community.frame.work/t/framework-desktop-deep-dive-p...
Without CUDA, being an AMD GPU. Big warning depending on the tools you want to use.
https://docs.scale-lang.com/stable/
https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA
It's not perfect but it's a start towards unification. In the end though, we're at the same crossroads that graphics drivers were in 2013 with the sunsetting of OpenGL by Apple and the announcement of Vulkan by Khronos Group. CUDA has been around for a while and only recently has it gotten attention from the other chip makers. Thank goodness for open source and the collective minds that participate.
Biggest limitations are the memory bandwidth which limits token generation and the fact it's not a CUDA chip, meaning longer time until first token for theoretically similar hardware specifications.
Any model bigger than what fits in 32 GB VRAM is - in my opinion - currently unusable on "consumer" hardware. Perhaps a tinybox with 144 GB of VRAM and close to 6 TB/s memory bandwidth will get you a nice experience for consumer grade hardware but it's quite the investment (and power draw)
Currently avoid machines with soldered memory, but if memory can be replaced and still have similar performance, that would change things.
You absolutely can (and should) build your own for slightly cheaper. Just find the fastest DDR5 CUDIMMs you can paired with the fastest memory bus mobo.
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 :)
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.
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.
The only selling point is the form factor and a massive amount of GPU memory, but a dGPU offers more raw compute.
This is literally the limitation of the platform. Why even bring that up? Framework took a part made by AMD and put in their devices.
All those SteamOS handhelds are on AMD.
Of course this PC is interesting in that it’s more “workstation class” and I’m not sure how much thermals matter there, but maybe this is an iteration towards a Mac Studio like device.
Pair a power-efficient mobile chip with a mini-desktop form factor and a good (i.e. probably overengineered, to some extent) cooling solution, and it will give you a kind of sustained performance and reliability over time that you just aren't going to get from the average consumer/enthusiast desktop chip. Great for workstation-like use cases that still don't quite need the raw performance and official support you'd get from a real, honest-to-goodness HEDT.
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.
I think that might be overstating it a bit. Real "rugged" laptops do exist, and would be quite at home in that kind of use (well, usually you'd worry a lot more about how kids in primary school will treat your hardware than teenagers) but the Framework 12 is not one.
All school laptop fleets I've seen are simply the cheapest thing they can buy in bulk, when it breaks provision a new one.
Framework Desktop price with default selections, 32GB of RAM, 500 GB storage: $1,242.00 USD
Mac Mini with 32GB of RAM, 512 GB storage: $1,199.00
Post changed a bit since I started replying, so:
> For the purposes of running LLM models, a Mac Mini
The M4 Max is the one that actually gives you a shit load of memory bandwidth. If you just get a normal M4 it's not going to be especially good at that.
> it doesn't have MacOS
The Mac can't run Windows, which is used by ~75% of all desktop computer users and the main operating system that video games target. I'd say that would be the bigger problem for many.
> Apple's service
What advantage does that get you over Framework's service?
> resale value
Framework resale value has proven to be excellent by the way. Go to eBay, search "Framework Laptop", go to "Sold Items". Many SKUs seem to be retaining most of their value.
(Nevermind the ease of repair for the Framework, or the superior expandability. If you want to expand the disk space on an M4 you need to get sketchy parts, possibly solder things, and rescue your Mac with another Mac. For framework devices you plug in another M.2 card.)
You're looking at the wrong Mac Mini. The model with the M4 Pro is the right comparison, on account of also having a 256-bit memory bus giving substantially higher bandwidth than a typical desktop computer. The M4 Pro model doesn't have a 32GB option.
The M4 Max (not available in a Mac Mini) has an even larger memory bus, giving it far more bandwidth than either the M4 Pro or the AMD Strix Halo part used by Framework.
The Framework Desktop Max+ 395 with 128 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB SSD costs around $2,147.00 USD before tax. The M4 Pro with the 20-core GPU, 64 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD costs around $2,199.00 USD. That's still short 64 GB of RAM, of course.*
The lowest-end M4 Max Mac Studio that can support 128 GB of RAM seems to cost $3,499.00 with 128 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD. For that you get 546GB/s of maximum memory bandwidth according to Apple, which is definitely a step up from the 256GB/s maximum for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, but obviously also at a price that is quite higher too.
Apparently though, 128 GB of RAM is currently the ceiling for the M4 Max right now. So it seems like if you were going for a maximum performance local AI cluster at any price, the M3 Ultra Mac Studios are definitely in the running, though at that point it probably is starting to get to the price where AMD and NVIDIA's data center GPUs start to enter the picture, and AMD Instinct cards measure memory bandwidth in terabytes per second.
* Regarding GPUs: The Framework Desktop Max+ 395 Radeon 8060S seems to be vastly faster than all of the non-Max M4 SKUs, for anyone that cares a lot about GPU performance. The M4 Max seems to outperform the 8060S by a bit though, and obviously it has some stand-out features like a shit load of video encoding/decoding hardware. This complicates the value comparison a lot. The Radeon core definitely gets a much better value for the performance in any case. I'm really impressed by what they managed to do there.
Microsoft's AMD64 emulator is slow and buggy compared to Rosetta, and you will need it a lot more, too. Many apps will need to rely on this, including programs many users will immediately try to use, like Visual Studio. Neither Visual Studio nor its compilers support running on an ARM host; it does seem to basically work, but is slow, which is not good considering Visual Studio is already not particularly fast. It will even display a message box warning you that it is not supported during setup, so you couldn't miss it (note that this applies to the Visual Studio compilers needed by Python and Node for installing packages with C extensions). MSys2 gave me a lot of trouble, too; the setup just doesn't seem to work on ARM64. Chocolatey often installs AMD64 or x86 binaries on ARM instead of native ones; sometimes native ones don't exist anyways. Third party thing that needs to load a kernel module? Don't bet on there being an ARM64 build of it; sometimes there is, sometimes there isn't. WinFSP has a build, many hardware drivers I've looked at don't seem to (don't laugh: you can pass through USB devices, there is sense in installing actual hardware drivers.) I just set up a fresh copy of Parallels on an M3 Mac a couple months ago, I'm stopping now to be terse, this paragraph could easily be much longer. It would suffice to say that basic Windows software usage is a lot worse on Parallels than a native Windows AMD64 machine. Very useful, sure. At parity, oh no. Not close.
That's just the basics though. For GPU, Parallels does do some D3D11 translation which is (a lot!) better than nothing, but you are not getting native performance, you are not getting Vulkan support, and you are certainly not getting ROCm or CUDA or anything equivalent, so actually a lot of apps that practically need GPU acceleration are not going to be usable anyways. Even if a video game would run, anti-piracy and anti-cheat measures in lots of modern games detect and block users using VM software, not that you can expect that all of the games you want to run would even work anyways on ARM; plenty of games are known to be unstable and some don't work at all. There are other side effects of trying to do actual gaming in VMs in general, but I really think this gets the point across: Windows games and multimedia are significantly worse in Parallels than on a native machine.
Parallels filesystem bridging is impractical, it's not fast enough and it is buggy, i.e. running Bazel on bridged files will not work. This means you need to copy stuff back and forth basically all the time if you want to work on stuff natively but then test on Windows. Maybe this is partly Window's fault, but in any case it would suffice to say that workflows that involve Windows will be a lot clunkier than they would be on a native Windows machine.
I think these conclusions, that a native Windows machine would be a lot better for doing Windows things than a Mac running Parallels, is actually pretty obvious and self-evident, but reading what you said might literally give someone the opposite impression, that there is little reason to possibly want to run Windows. This is just misleading. Parallels is a great option as a last resort or to fill a gap, but if you have anything that regularly requires you to use Windows software or test on Windows, Parallels is not a very serious option. It may be cheaper than two machines in fiat currency, but probably not in sanity.
I don't know you, so I can't and won't, based on a single post, accuse you of being a fanboy. However, this genre of retort is a serious issue with fanboyism. It's easy to say "Windows? just use VMs!", but that's because for some people, actually just using Windows is probably not a serious option they would consider anyways; if the VM didn't work for a use case they'd back up and reconsider almost anything else before they reconsider their choice of OS or hardware vendor, but they probably barely need (if at all) a VM with Windows anyways. If this feels like a personal attack, I'd like to clarify that I am describing myself. I will not use Windows. I don't have a bare metal Windows machine in my house, and I do my best to limit Windows usage in VMs, too. Hell, I will basically only use macOS under duress these days, I'm not a fan of the direction it has gone either.
Still, I do not go around telling people that they should just go switch to Linux if they don't like Windows, and that Virtualbox or Wine will solve all of their problems, because that's probably not true and it's downright dishonest when deep down I know how well the experience will go. The honest and respectful thing to tell people about Linux is that it will suck, some of the random hardware you use might not work, some of your software won't work well under Wine or VMs, and you might spend more time troubleshooting. If they're still interested even after proper cautioning, chances are they'll actually go through with it and figure it out: people do not need to be sold a romantic vision, if anything they need the opposite, because they may struggle to foresee what kinds of problems they might run into. Telling people that virtual machines are a magic solution and you don't have to care about software compatibility is insane, and I say that with full awareness that Parallels is better than many of the other options in terms of user friendliness and out of the box capabilities.
I think the same thing is fair to do for macOS. With macOS there is the advantage that the entire experience is nicer as long as everything you want to do fits nicely into Apple's opinionated playbook and you buy into Apple's ecosystem, but I rarely hear people actually mention those latter caveats. I rarely hear people mention that, oh yeah, a lot of cool features I use only work because i use Apple hardware and services throughout my entire life, and your Android phone might not work as well, especially not with those expensive headphones I think you should get for your Mac. Fanboys of things have a dastardly way of only showing people the compelling side of things and leaving out the caveats. I don't appreciate this, and I think it ultimately has an overtone of thinking you know what someone wants better than they do. If someone is really going to be interested in living the Mac life, they don't need to be mislead to be compelled.
If the purpose is running LLMs non of that matters.
But Linux support is an advantage. Does the M4 have that?
I run Linux containers all the time.
The LLM point is that Linux is better suited for most AI tools and their toolchains
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.
It's not in the package, it's on the motherboard spread around the SoC package: https://www.hp.com/content/dam/sites/worldwide/personal-comp...
The 8 DRAM packages pretty clearly indicate you're not getting the extra capacity for end-to-end ECC as you would on a typical workstation or server memory module.
I now ordered a Beelink GTR9 Pro, which unlike the Framework has dual 10G Ethernet, not the weird 5G flavor. We'll see how that goes.
Plus, you can now deploy [MLX projects on CUDA](https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/pull/1983)
No processor can come close to performance per watt, and performance per watt wins the laptop market. Laptop market dominates PC sales
The grass is not the same on the other side
And thus their machines are expensive toys as well.
(I type this on a system I built, a 9800x3d with 96GB (2x 48GB) ECC RAM.)
>If your only aim is to run LLMs how much do you actually care about ECC?
That is not me, nor do I know anyone who exclusively uses computers to run LLMs.
That results in significantly better performance.
There's always tradeoffs and people propose many things. Selling those things as a product is another game entirely.
This is a matter of physics. It can't be "fixed." Signal integrity is why classic GPU cards have GiBs of integrated RAM chips: GPUs with non-upgradeable RAM that people have been happily buying for years now.
Today, the RAM requirements of GPU and their applications has become so large that the extra, low cost, slow, socketed RAM is now a false economy. Naturally, therefore, it's being eliminated as PCs evolve into big GPUs, with one flavor or other of traditional ISA processing elements attached.
Going from 64 GB to 128 GB of soldered RAM on the Framework Desktop costs €470, which doesn’t seem that much more expensive than fast socketed RAM. Going from 64 GB to 128 GB on a Mac Studio costs €1000.
Let us all know when you've computed that answer. I'll be interested, because I have no idea how to go about it.
The only essential part of sockets vs solder is the metal-metal contacts. The size of the modules and the distance from the CPU/GPU are all adjustable parameters if the will exists to change them.
And at GHz speeds that matters more than you may think.
Yes. The "conservative attitudes" of JEDEC et al. are a consequence of physics and the capabilities of every party involved in dealing with it, from the RAM chip fabricators and PCB manufacturers, all the way to you, the consumer, and the price you're willing to pay for motherboards, power supplies, memory controllers, and yield costs incurred trying to build all of this stuff, such that you can sort by price, mail order some likely untested combination of affordable components and stick them together with a fair chance that it will all "work" within the power consumption envelope, thermal envelope, and failure rate you're likely to tolerate. Every iteration of the standards is another attempt to strike the right balance all the way up and down this chain, and at the root of everything is the physics of signal integrity, power consumption, thermals and component reliability.
Soldering RAM has always been around and it has its benefits. I'm not convinced of its necessity however. We're just now getting a new memory socket form factor but the need was emerging a decade ago.
Yeah... And that’s a pretty damn big difference. A connector is always going to result in worse signal integrity than a high-quality solder joint in the real world.
No doubt the most tightly integrated package can outperform a looser collection of components. But if we could shorten the distances, tighten the tolerances, and have the IC companies work on improving the whole landscape instead of just narrow, disjointed pieces slowly one at a time, then would the unsoldered connections still cause a massive performance loss or just a minor one?
Besides, no one strictly need mid-life upgradable RAMs. You're just wanting to be able to upgrade RAM later after purchase because it's cheaper upfront and also because it leaves less room for supply side for price gouging. Those aren't technical reasons you can't option a 2TB RAM on purchase and be done for 10 years.
Part of the reason I have doubts about the physical necessity here is because PCI Express (x16) is roughly keeping up with GDDR in terms of bandwidth. Of course they are not completely apples-to-apples comparable, but it proves at least that it's possible to have a high-bandwidth unsoldered interface. I will admit though that what I can find indicates that signal integrity is the biggest issue each new generation of PCIe has to overcome.
It's possible that the best solution for discrete PC components will be to move what we today call RAM onto the CPU package (which is also very likely to become a CPU+GPU package) and then keep PCIe x16 around to provide another tier of fast but upgradeable storage.
But in general yes, PCIe vs RAM bandwidth is like comparing apples to watermelons. One’s bigger than the other and they’re both fruits, but they’re not the same thing.
Generally people don’t talk about random-access PCIe latency because it generally doesn’t matter. You’re looking at a best-case 3x latency penalty for PCIe vs RAM, usually more like an order of magnitude or more. PCIe is really designed for maximum throughput, not minimum latency. If you make the same tradeoffs with RAM you can start tipping the scale the other way - but people really care about random access latency in RAM (almost like it’s in the name) so that generally doesn’t happen outside of specific scenarios. 500ns 16000MT/s RAM won’t sell (and would be a massive pain - you’d probably need to 1.5x bus width to achieve that, which means more pins on the CPU, which means larger packages, which means more motherboard real estate taken and more trace length/signal integrity concerns, and you’d need to somehow convince everyone to use your new larger DIMM...).
You can also add more memory channels to effective double/quadruple/sextuple memory bandwidth, but again, package constraints + signal integrity increases costs substantially. My threadripper pro system does ~340GB/s and ~65ns latency (real world) with 8 memory channels - but the die is huge, CPUs are expensive as hell, and motherboards are also expensive as hell. And for the first ~9 months after release the motherboards all struggled heavily with various RAM configurations.
Intel's Lunar Lake low-power laptop processors launched in fall 2024 use on-package LPDDR5x running at 8533MT/s, as do Apple's M4 Pro and M4 Max.
So at the moment, soldered DRAM offers 33% more bandwidth for the same bus width, and is the only way to get more than a 128-bit bus width in anything smaller than a desktop workstation.
Smartphones are already moving beyond 9600MT/s for their RAM, in part because they typically only use a 64-bit bus with. GPUs are at 30000MT/s with GDDR7 memory.
For local LLM the higher memory bandwith of M4 Max makes it much more performant.
Arstechnica has more benchmarks for non-llm things https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/review-framework-des...
There is a chance to build a real MacOS/iOS alternatives without a JVM abstraction layer on top like Android. The reason it didn't happen yet is the GPL firewall around the Linux kernel imo.
It may be explained by integer vs float performance, though I am too lazy to investigate. A weak data point, using a matrix product of N=6000 matrix by itself on numpy:
- SER 8 8745, linux: 280 ms -> 1.53 Tflops (single prec)
- my m2 macbook air: it is ~180ms ms -> ~2.4 Tflops (single prec)
The AMD AI MAX 395+ gives you 256GB/sec. The M4 gives you 120GB/s, and the M4 Pro gives you 273GB/s. The M4 Max: 410GB/s (14‑core CPU/32‑core GPU) or 546GB/s (16‑core CPU/40‑core GPU).
Apple M chips are slower on the computation that AMD chips, but they have soldered on-package fast ram with a wide memory interface, which is very useful on workloads that handle lots of data.
Strix halo has a 256-bit LPDDR5X interface, twice as wide as the typical desktop chip, roughly equal to the M4 Pro and half of that of the M4 Max.
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_...
Why do you think TSMC's production being in Taiwan is basically a national security issue for the U.S. at this point?
Apple Silicon might not be that special from an architecture perspective (although treating integrated GPUs as appropriate for workloads other than low end laptops was a break with industry trends), but it’s very special from an economic perspective. The Apple Silicon unit volumes from iPhones have financed TSMC’s rise to semiconductor process dominance and, it would appear, permanently dethroned Intel.
Update: To give an idea of the scales involved here, Apple had iPhone revenue in 2024 of about $200B. At an average selling price of $1k, we get 200 million units. Thats a ballpark estimate, they don’t release unit volumes, AFAIK. This link from IDC[1] has the global PC market in 2024 at about 267 million units. Apple also has iPads and Macs, so their unit processor volume is roughly comparable to the entire PC market. But, and this is hugely important: every single processor that Apple ships is comparable in performance (and, thus, transistor counts) to high end PC processors. So their transistor volume probably exceeds the entire PC CPU market. And the majority of it is fabbed on TSMC’s leading process node in any given year.
I hate apple but there is obviously something special about it
An M4 Pro is the more appropriate comparison. I don't know why he's doing price comparisons to a Mac Studio when you can get a 64GB M4 Pro Mac Mini (the closest price/performance comparison point) for much less.
Where?
An M4 Pro Mac Mini is priced higher than the Framework here in Canada...
The summary is that Framework was understaffed and has brought in an established third party to help with firmware and driver updates.
Are you sure you didn't buy an Intel one by any change? Because Intel is garbage.
[1] https://github.com/divestedcg/real-ucode?tab=readme-ov-file#...
[1] https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-bd790i-x3d
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1jn5uto/macbook...
I suspect this one is very similar hardware and a slightly better deal if you give up the cool factor of Framework. Although I don't really know.
Anyone compared them head-to-head?
This comparison uses hp G1a but I imagine it wouldnt be too far off from GMKtec: https://www.phoronix.com/review/framework-desktop-linux/9
Framework can be fed with more power to support better sustained performance is my understanding.
- framework only sells to specific countries. Warranty won't even be an issue if you can't buy one in the first place.
- Chinese manufacturers offer support and warranty. In particular GMKTek does[0].
- Repairability will be at best on par with framework, but better than a random western brand. Think HP and their repairability track record.
"just a Chinese company" feels pretty weird as a qualificative in this day and age when Chinese companies are on average ahead of the curve.
Maybe when we run out of reasons to buy american or european or japanese they will wake up, but I don't see it.
For me as a Canadian, Framework being an American company was always a problem because their shipping and availability to here were actually inferior to overseas suppliers despite being on the same continent (this is frankly often the case because of American business arrogance and blindness to the Canadian market -- things ship faster from Europe than from American suppliers for me, on the whole).
But now with the idiotic trade war talk, it's even worse since I'm likely to be hit by a retalliatory tariff situation.
Some day hopefully all this dollar store economic nationalism will blow over, but in the meantime it's too bad Framework has a good product and isn't European or Asian, because I won't buy it now.
Chinese companies are not on par with Western ones. The QA, safety measures, hazard compliance, warranty, or even proper English (they use an online translator service) isn't there. Cha bu duo is an accurate description of Chinese products.
From the link you send they offer 7 days return policy. In EU you got 2 weeks, legally enforced. Companies like Amazon offer even a month. Then they have a restock fee of 15%. This is AFAIK allowed (if proportional to the damage to the product) but it does not seem proportional. Companies like Amazon don't do this. And Amazon isn't great; they have a lot of cheap Chinese dropshipping brand. Then they often lie in China as well. They claim leather, when you buy it it is fake leather.
Cha bu duo can be good enough if you are on a tight budget, or if the product isn't available otherwise (how I ended up with GPD Pocket 2 back around 2018). But I have personally witnessed how Xiaomi smartphones fucked up a mid sized non-profit who dealt with very sensitive personal details. They went for budget, ended up with a support nightmare, and something which shouldn't be GDPR compliant. Cause yeah, spyware and bloatware is another issue.
Furthermore, Framework sell to Western countries.
I agree with your general point though, 'Chinese' does not mean bad quality, warranty, etc. It's more a property of a bunch of Chinese computer companies selling through AliExpress, Amazon, etc. Their quality and service might improve as they grow.
As an aside, Lenovo are pretty awesome. For ThinkStations, ThinkPads, etc. they have in-depth guides for supported memory configurations, disassembly, repair etc., often with part numbers. Their hardware also works well with fwupdmgr and they provide their own Linux support (like WWAN FCC unlock scripts).
These things would be important if they made products that actually work. My T14s Gen 3 AMD simply doesn’t work. Half the time I go to wake it from sleep, the firmware has crashed and I have to hard-reset it. I spent months trying to get Lenovo to fix this. They did replace the motherboard twice (once on-site, once shipped to them) and eventually replaced the entire laptop with a new one. None of this is useful when they can’t make a laptop that doesn’t crash while it sleeps.
Didn’t realize companies like DJI, BYD, CATL, Insta360, and Anker have a fail fast, fail early mentality.
Pet peeve: why should I care ?
People take grammatical errors as some ultimate gotcha and indicator of character flaw. I don't pay for the marketing nor value that they asked 3 translators to double-check each other to have flawless text for the damn first boot guide of a computer.
I see it the same as Framework's shaky YouTube presentations: they couldn't bother hiring a cameraman for their product presentations. What does that say about their computers ? To me absolutely nothing. I'll still buy one if it sounds nice enough.
> 7 days return policy.
It's from delivery.
For comparison, framework offers 30 days, but from shipping. Which means if your laptop takes more than a month to get delivered for whatever reason you virtually have no return window.
https://knowledgebase.frame.work/what-is-the-framework-retur...
> Cha bu duo
I hear you, but this is all relative to a market. There's no maker I can blindly trust whatever the country they operate in, and if we're going for cultural generalizations I'd set Tesla as the poster child of US manufacturers at this moment.
All in all, I get why we should be wary about Chinese makers. It's just the same reason we should be wary of every other makers, including those who'll screw their customer base on any other aspect that won't get picked up by a review (repairability has been one of these. Compatibility, durability, vendor lockin, standard parts etc. are other aspects.
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.
Also, Strix Halo NPU is 50 TOPS. The desktop RDNA 4 chips are into the 100s.
As for consumer uses, I mentioned it's an open question. Blender? FFmpeg? Database queries? Audio?
> The PFB is found in many different application domains such as radio astronomy, wireless communication, radar, ultrasound imaging and quantum computing.. the authors worked on the evaluation of a PFB on the AIE.. [developing] a performant dataflow implementation.. which made us curious about the AMD Ryzen NPU.
> The [NPU] PFB figure shows.. speedup of circa 9.5x compared to the Ryzen CPU.. TINA allows running a non-NN algorithm on the NPU with just two extra operations or approximately 20 lines of added code.. on [Nvidia] GPUs CUDA memory is a limiting factor.. This limitation is alleviated on the AMD Ryzen NPU since it shares the same memory with the CPU providing up to 64GB of memory.
> But when we switch to longer context, we see something interesting happen. WMMA + FA basically loses no performance at this longer context length!
> Vulkan + FA still has better pp but tg is significantly lower. More data points would be better, but seems like Vulkan performance may continue to decrease as context extends while the HIP+rocWMMA backend should perform better.
lhl has also been sharing these test results in https://forum.level1techs.com/t/strix-halo-ryzen-ai-max-395-..., and his latest comment provides a great summary of the current state:
> (What is bad is that basically every single model has a different optimal backend, and most of them have different optimal backends for pp (handling context) vs tg (new text)).
Anyway, for me, the greatest thing about the Strix Halo + llama.cpp combo is that we can throw one or more egpu into the mix, as echoed by level1tech video (https://youtu.be/ziZDzrDI7AM?t=485), which should help a lot with PP performance.
In the LLM world, you really only see CUDA being used with Triton and/or PyTorch consumers that haven't moved onto better pastures (mainly because they only know Python and aren't actually programmers).
That said, AMD can run most CUDA code through ROCm, and AMD officially supports Triton and PyTorch, so even the academics have a way out of Nvidia hell.
I'd rather it works and ships late than doesn't work and ships early and then get gaslit about the bugs (lol Nvidia, why are you like this?)
At least Java has types and can be performant. The world was ever so slightly better back then.
Edit: my point being that out of a large pool of novices, some of them will get better. Java was always more gate kept.
Second edit: Java’s intermediate programmer malaise was of course fueled by the Gang of Four’s promise to lead them out of confusion and into the blessed realm of reusable software.
So, just use Vulkan and stop fucking around with the Nvidia moat.
Game engines that have singular code generator paths that support multiple targets (eg, Vulkan, DX12, Xbone/XSX DX12, and PS4/5 GNM) have virtually identical performance on the DX12 and Vulkan outputs on Windows on AMD, have virtually identical performance on apples-to-apples Xbox to PS comparisons (scaled to their relative hardware specs), and have expected DX12 but not Vulkan performance on Windows on Nvidia.
Now, obviously, I'm giving a rather broad statement on that, all engines are different, some games on the same engine (especially UE4 and 5) are faster than one or the other on AMD, or purely faster entirely on any vendor, and some games are faster on Xbox than on PS, or vice versa, due to edge cases or porting mistakes. I suggest looking at, GamersNexus's benchmarks when looking at specific games or DigitalFoundry's work on benchmarking and analyzing consoles.
It is in Nvidia's best interest to make Vulkan look bad, but even now they're starting to understand that is a bad strategy, and the compute accelerator market is starting to become a bit crowded, so the Vulkan frontend for their compiler has slowly been getting better.
I don't think this is particularly correct, or at least worded a bit too strongly.
For Nvidia hardware, CUDA just gives the best performance, and there are many optimized libraries that you'd have to replace as well.
Granted, new ML frameworks tend to be more backend agnostic, but saying that CUDA is no longer being used, seems a bit odd.
There's a post on github of a madman who got llama.cpp generating tokens for an AI model that's running on an Intel Arc, Nvidia 3090, and AMD gpu at the same time. https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/5321
You can find out more here: https://docs.scale-lang.com/stable/
There are still many things that need implementing, most important ones being cuDNN and CUDA Graph API, but in my opinion, the list of things that are supported now is already quite impressive (and keeps improving): https://github.com/spectral-compute/scale-validation/tree/ma...
Disclaimer: I am one of the developers of SCALE.
A very quick Google search would show that pretty much everything also runs on ROCm.
Torch runs on CUDA and ROCm. Llama.cpp runs on CUDA, ROCm, SYCL, Vulkan and others...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/08/review-framework-des...
[1]: It sounds like a nitpick but a PCIe x16 with x4 effective bandwidth can exist and is a different thing: if the actual PCIe interface is x16, but there is an upstream bottleneck (e.g. aggregate bandwidth from chipset to CPU is not enough to handle all peripherals at once at full rate.)
To me this reads like "if you can afford those 256GB VRAM GPUs, you don't need PCIe bandwidth!"
That's pretty small.
Even Deepseek R1 0528 685b only has like ~16GB of attention weights. Kimi K2 with 1T parameters has 6168951472 attention params, which means ~12GB.
It's pretty easy to do prompt processing for massive models like Deepseek R1, Kimi K2, or Qwen 3 235b with only a single Nvidia 3090 gpu. Just do --n-cpu-moe 99 in llama.cpp or something similar.
So this might be the holy grail of "good enough GPU" and "over 100GB of VRAM" if the rest of the system can keep up.
I believe the fixed split thing is a historical remnant. These days, the OS can allocate memory for the GPU to use on the fly.
I want to know if it's possible. 4GB for Linux, a bit of room for the calculations, and then you can load a 122GB model entirely into VRAM.
How would that perform in real life? Someone please benchmark it!
I have that split set at the minimum 2 GB and I'm giving the GPU a 20 GB model to process.
You're talking about an allocator policy for when to allow GTT and when not, not the old firmware-level VRAM split thing where whatever size the BIOS sets for VRAM is permanently away from the CPU. The max GTT limit is there to decrease accidental footguns, it's not a technological limitation; at least earlier the default policy was to reserve 1/4 of RAM for non-GPU use, and 1/4*128 GB=32GB is more than enough so you're looking to adjust the policy. It's just an if statement in the kernel, GTT the mechanism doesn't limit it, and deallocating a chunk of memory used by the GPU returns it to the general kernel memory pool, where it can next be used by the CPU again.
> It seems like tools will have to adapt to dynamic VRAM allocation, as none of the monitoring tools I've tested assume VRAM can be increased on the fly.
amdgpu_top shows VRAM (the old fixed thing) and GTT (dynamic) separately.
That’d really drive compute.
That would involve NUMA, and your memory bandwidth for cross-chip compute would probably suck. Would that even beat a simple cluster in performance?
The full on high power one is the MI300A which is indeed superb.
Tim Sweeney is in the same camp.
[1] https://www.hey.com/apple/
[2] https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-rejects-the-hey-calendar-fro...
[3] https://world.hey.com/dhh/hey-is-finally-for-sale-on-the-iph...
My test suite currently runs in ~6 seconds on 9700K. Would be nice to speed it up, but maybe not for $2000 :-) Last I checked 13700K or 13900K looked like the price/performance sweet spot, but perhaps there are better options?
16 cores, 32 threads, only a bit less powerful than a desktop Ryzen 7950X or a 14900K, but with a comparatively low power usage.
About 500€ barebones, then you add your own SSD and SO-DIMM RAM.
Is it noisy? Does it keep up with the 7950X?
It has the 8945HS CPU, the article benchmarks against 8745H which is a little bit slower. It's a very worthy price point to consider, tiny and very quiet.
qwen3:30b-a3b runs locally at 23.25 tokens/sec. I know 395+ chip would about approximately double that, but I'm not quite willing to put $2000 into that upgrade.
Absolutely nothing. 6 seconds is about the time it will take you to tab to your terminal, press up arrow, find your test task and run it. There's no amount of money that makes it go from 6 to 3, and no world in which there's any value to it.
In addition, upgrading to a 13900K means you're playing the Intel Dance: sockets have (again) changed, in an (again) incompatible manner. So you're looking at, at the very least, a new CPU, a new motherboard, potentially a new cooler, and if you're going too forward with CPUs, new RAM since Intel's Z890 is not DDR4 compatible (and the Z390 was not DDR5 compatible). Or buying an entire new PC.
Since you're behind a socket wall, the reasonable option for an upgrade would rather be a sizeable one, and most likely abandoning Intel to its stupid decisions for a while and instead going for Zen 5 CPUs, which are going to be socket compatible for a good 7 years at least.
In addition, considering "saving" is something that happens on pretty much any non-code interaction, it means your tests are broken half the time when you're working. That's useless noise.
I'm thinking about a new system, not upgrading the existing one.
AMD reached out to Framework and said "Hey, we have this new CPU, do you want to do something with it?". And the engineers at Framework jumped at the opportunity.
So the CPU and RAM are soldered on the motherboard.
You can buy just the motherboard from Framework: https://frame.work/products/framework-desktop-mainboard-amd-...
What do you mean? Linux had SSH (and before that rlogin) for a very long time already.
If OP just meant remote management through a BMC then that's not common except for server hardware, and it would have features like Redfish to configure the hardware itself. Apple devices don't have this.
You can also buy hardware to act as a remote keyboard/mouse/monitor and power button, and it supports systems whose motherboards have the right headers: https://pikvm.org/
If you had Linux on a MDM-enrolled Mac there wouldn't be anything MDM-related running during or after the boot process. But presumably any sane MDM config would prevent the end user from accessing the settings necessary to relax boot security to get Linux installed in the first place.
But, eh, I still think it's fair to describe it as a feature of the firmware. The enrollment and prevention of removal have firmware-level components through Apple's Secure Boot and System Integrity Protection. A user can't simply disable MDM because these firmware-level protections prevent tampering with the enrollment.
Case in point, getting Linux installed in the first place would be blocked by firmware-level boot policies, right? I'm not too knowledge about this, and maybe you are more so.
It's not too different from scaremongering about Intel ME/AMT which is often maligned even in the context of computers that don't have the necessary Intel NICs for the remote management features.
But it's still entirely factual in my own description. When a device checks in during initial setup, the firmware-level boot process can receive policies that block alternative OS installation, and that absolutely is a feature of the firmware.
Anyway, I tried to interpret OP's meaning, and provided more detail on how Apple's firmware is special.
Given repair isn't practical with soldered DRAM and such, I prioritized small form factor, price, and quick delivery.
The Framework Desktop was a much larger form factor, 3x the price, and delivery wasn't for months.
That said, I still hope the company is successful so they have more competitive offerings in the future.
Window managers are usually the last issue on modern Linux. Pretty much any native app is okay.
Troubles really start (and start fast) when you open any browser and load any modern website. Had we more native applications (so not cloud stuff, and not javascript stuff with a bundled chromium) we'd all have a much better overall computing experience.
Also, this reminds me of "SkyReach Tiny":
https://store.nfc-systems.com/products/skyreach-4-tiny
an even smaller case, very versatile. No pluggable gimmicks though.
Framework: 4.5L (~5.5x larger than Mac Mini)
Mac Mini: 0.8L
Max+ 395 specced with: 128GB of non-upgradeable LPDDR5x WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe - M.2 2280 - 8TB Noctua fan 3x + 3x extra USB-A & USB-C ports No OS option.
only $2,776.00!!!
Paying twice the price for twice to seven times the performance may not be such a bad thing. Then again, with Apple you're kind of stuck with macOS and the like, so Framework may still be the better option depending on your use case.
People seem to really not understand the limits of wanting unified memory architecture.
And it's ~$1000 to build a PC with a similar CPU, somewhat larger form factor, and fans. Unless the AI processor is actually useful for AI, and you need that, this is silly.
Framework desktop dimensions are 20.6 x 9.7 x 22.6 LWH. My IM01 case is 37.2 x 18.5 x 28.7. It won't be going in my bag, but it fits nicely on a desktop.
Pre-builts are so expensive these days...
And even more curious, Framework Desktop is deliberately less repairable than their laptops. They soldered on the RAM. Which makes it a very strange entry for a brand marketing itself as the DIY dream manufacturer. They threw away their user-repairable mantra when they made the Desktop, it's less user repairable than most other desktops you could go out and buy today.
Would desoldering the sockets help?
Why are the sockets bad?
This sort-of-interview of Nirav Patel (ceo of framework) explains in a bit more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lErGZZgUbY
Basically, they need to use LPDDR5X memory, which isn't available in socketed form, because of signal integrity reasons.
Which means you won't see an improvement if you solder your ram directly, I think mostly because your home soldering job will suffer signal integrity issues, but also because your RAM isn't LPCAMM and isn't spread across a 256 bit bus.
Like physics PhD-level more.
This is also the reasoning why you can't just have a dumb female to female HDMI coupling and expect video to work. All of such devices are active and read the stream on the input and relay them on the output.
Above certain frequencies, you start running into major issues with signal integrity, and fixing them is very difficult without any extra circuitry.
Without that, it's really not a interesting solution.
demanding replaceable ram means also not wanting the benefits of the integrated memory
Personally I think it's bad that apple products are so poorly repairable and so expensive to upgrade.
Soldered RAM, CPU, and GPU, that give space benefits and performance benefits is exactly what I want, and results in no more ewaste at all. In fact less ewaste, because if I had a smaller form factor I could justify keeping the older computer around for longer. The size of the thing is a bigger cause of waste for me than the ability to upgrade RAM.
Not everybody upgrades RAM, and those people deserve computers too. Framework's brand appears to be offering something that other suppliers are not, rather than expand ability. That's a much better brand and niche overall.
No. It's end of the line with consumerism and we either start repairing and recycling or we die. Framework catered to people who agree with that, and this product is not in line.
I have no idea why you would not upgrade your memory, I have done so in all PCs I ever owned and all laptops, and it's a very common (and cheap) upgrade. It reduces waste because people can then use their system longer, which means less garbage over the lifetime of a person. And as was already commented, it is not only about upgrades, but also about repairs. Ram breaks rather often.
Upgrading the RAM would have created more waste than properly sizing the RAM to COU proportion from the beginning.
It is very odd to encounter someone who has such a narrow view of computing that they cannot imagine someone not upgrading their RAM.
I have not once, literally not once have RAM break either. I have been part of the management of clusters of hundreds of compute nodes, that would occasionally each have their failures, but not once was RAM the cause of failure. I'm fairly shocked to hear that anybody's RAM has failed, honestly, unless it's been overlocked or something else.
Uncalled for and means the end of the discussion after this reaction. Ofc I can imagine that, it's just usually a dumb decision.
That you did not have to upgrade the ram means one of two things: You either had completely linear workloads, so unlike me did not switch to a compiled programming language or experimented with local LLMs etc. Or you bought a lot of ram in the beginning, so 8 years ago with a hefty premium.
Changes nothing about the fundamental disagreement with the existence of such machines. Especially from a company that knows better. I do not expect ethical behaviour from a bottom of the barrel company like Apple, but it was completely reasonable to expect better from framework.
One of the primary objections to soldered RAM was/is the cost to purchase. As the likes of Apple priced Ram upgrade at a hefty premium to retail prices.
But are Framework's RAM prices unreasonable? $400 for 64GB more of LPDDR5x seems OK. I haven't seen anybody object to Framework's RAM on those grounds.
My current laptop (ASUS GA503QM) had 8GB soldered and 8GB socketed. I didn’t want to go for the 16+16 model because it was way more expensive due to shifting from a decent GPU to a top-of-the-line GPU, and a more-expensive-but-barely-faster CPU. (I would have preferred it with no dedicated GPU—it would have been a couple of hundred USD cheaper, a little lighter, probably more reliable, less fiddly, and have supported two external displays under Linux (which I’ve never managed, even with nvidia drivers); but at the time no one was selling a high-DPI laptop with a Ryzen 5800H or similar without dedicated graphics.) So after some time I got a 32GB stick and now I have 40GB of RAM. And I gave my sister the 8GB stick to replace a 4GB stick in her laptop, and that improved it significantly for her.
You might be surprised. Living in a large city, everything I have put for sale has found a new owner. Old and seemingly useless computer hardware, HDMI cables that don't support 4K, worn-out cutlery, hairdryer that's missing parts, non-functional amplifier, the list goes on. If the price is right (=very low), someone has always showed up in person to carry these away. And I'm always very upfront about any deficiencies so that they know what they're getting.
I'd say a common profile for the new owner is young people who have just moved and are on a shoestring budget.
With an increased number of channels, you could have a greater amount of RAM at a lower frequency but at the same bandwidth. So you would at least be able to run some of these much larger AI models.
The only way to achieve what you're after is to do any of;
- Give up on unified memory and switch to a traditional platform (which there are thousands of alternatives for)
- Cripple the GPU for games and some productivity software by raising latency beyond the norm.
- Change to a server-class chip for 5x the price.
This is an amazing chip giving server-class specs in a cheap mobile platform, that fill a special nieche in the market for for both productivity and local AI at a very competitive price. What you're arguing for makes no sense.
For example Nvidia seek to ban consumer GPU use in datacenters as they to sell datacentre GPUs.
If they made consumer platforms that can take 1tb of ram etc, then people may choose to not buy EYPC.
Afterall many cloud providers already offer Ryzen VPS's.
We need a bigger memory controller.
To get more traces to the memory controller We need more pins on the CPU.
Now need a bigger CPU package to accommodate the pins.
Now we need a motherboard with more traces, which requires more layers, which requires a more expensive motherboard.
We need a bigger motherboard to accommodate the 6 or 8 dimm sockets.
The additional traces, longer traces, more layers on the motherboard, and related makes the signalling harder, likely needs ECC or even registered ECC.
We need a more expensive CPU, more expensive motherboard, more power, more cooling, and a larger system. Congratulations you've reinvented threadripper (4 channel), siena (6 channel), Threadripper pro (8 channel), or epyc (12 channel). All larger, more expensive more than 2x the power, and is likely to be in a $5-$15k workstation/server not a $2k framework desktop the size of a liter of milk or so.
This is the real story not the conspiracy-tinged market segmentation one. Which is silly because at levels where high-end consumer/enthusiast Ryzen (say, 9950 X3D) and lowest-end Threadripper/EPYC (most likely a previous-gen chip) just happen to truly overlap in performance, the former will generally cost you more!
However Apple will let you upgrade to the pro (double the bandwidth), max (4x the bandwidth), and ultra (8x the bandwidth). The m4 max is still efficient, gives decent battery life in a thin light laptop. Even the ultra is pretty quiet/cool even in a tiny mac studio MUCH smaller than any thread ripper pro build I've seen.
Does mystify me that x86 has a hard time matching even a mac mini pro on bandwidth, let alone the models with 2x or 4x the memory bandwidth.
(I suppose that you could devise a platform with support for mixing both "fast" in-package and "slow" DIMM-socketed memory, which could become interesting for all sorts of high-end RAM-hungry workloads, not just AI. No idea how that would impact the overall tradeoffs though, might just be infeasible.
...Also if persistent memory (phase-change or MRAM) can solve the well-known endurance issues with flash, maybe that ultimately becomes the preferred substrate for "slow" bulk RAM? Not sure about that either.)
The market dynamics are pretty clear. Having that much memory bandwidth only makes sense if you're going to provide an integrated GPU that can use that bandwidth; CPU-based laptop/desktop workloads that bandwidth-hungry are too rare. The PC market has long been relying on discrete GPUs for any high-performance GPU configuration, and the GPU market leader is the one that doesn't make x86 CPUs.
Intel's consumer CPU product line is a confusing mess, but at the silicon level it comes down to one or two designs for laptops (a low-power and a mid-power design) that are both adequately served by a 128-bit memory bus, and one or two desktop designs with only a token iGPU. The rest of the complexity comes from binning on clock speeds and core counts, and sometimes putting the desktop CPU in a BGA package for high-power laptops.
For Intel to make a part following the Strix Halo and Apple strategy, Intel would need to add a third major category of consumer CPU silicon, using far more than twice the total die size of any of their existing consumer CPUs, to go after a niche that's pretty small and very hard for Intel to break into given the poor quality of their current GPU IP. Intel doesn't have the cash to burn pursuing something like this.
It's a bit surprising AMD actually went for it, but they were in a better position than Intel to make a part like Strix Halo from both a CPU and GPU IP perspective. But they still ended up not including their latest GPU architecture, and only went for a 256-bit bus rather than 512-bit.
L2 CPU cache used to be on the motherboard and user expandable.
I was commenting on a brand based on repairability selling a product that's deliberately not repairable. It's a curious choice to throw away the branding that brought them to where they are, and hopefully not the start of a trend for their other devices.
It's easy to find out the reason for this. And the article's benchmarks confirm the validity of this reason. Why comment from a place of ignorance, unless you're asking a question?
There are plenty of components to choose from which do not need soldered-on RAM. Giving up modularity to gain access to higher memory bandwidth is certainly a trafeoff many are willing to make, but to take that tradeoff as a company known for modularity is, as the parent comment put it, curious.
And as I said, if you read the article, you'll see that the tradeoff in question has paid off very well.
1. Framework branded themselves as the company for DIY computer repairability and maintainability in the laptop space.
2. They've now released a desktop that is less repairable than their laptops, and much less repairable than most desktops you can buy today.
That's what I consider a curious move.
The hardware choice may provide a good reason to solder on the RAM, but I wasn't commenting on that and have no idea how anyone could read my comment and have that be their takeaway.
I was commenting on a brand throwing away the thing it's marketed itself for. In exchange for repairability, you now get shiny baubles like custom tiles for the case.
I don't see what you see. It's a single product, not a realignment of their business model. They saw an opportunity and brought to market a product that will likely sell out, which tells us that customers are happy to make the trade-off of modularity and repairability for what the Strix Halo brings to the table. I think your interpretation of their mission is a bit uncharitable, maybe naive, and leaves the company little room to be a company.
Fair enough that a company might bring out products which differ from their core market, but in this instance I have to agree that releasing a desktop PC with soldered on RAM very much goes against the place they have positioned themselves in the market.
Perhaps a better solution would be to start releasing a newly branded product line of not so repairable machines, but keeping the name 'Framwork' for their main offerings.
This was also my first thought when discovering this new model, but I think it was a pragmatic design decision.
The questions you should ask yourself are:
- which upgradable memory module format could be used with the same speed and bandwidth as the soldered in solution,
- if this solution exists, how much would it cost
- what's the maximum supported amount of ram for this CPU
CAMM perhaps? The modular memory is important, because they are selling them to two different markets: gamers that want a small powerful desktop, and people running LLMs at home. The modularity of the RAM allows you to convert the former into the latter at a later date, so it seems pretty critical to me.
For this reason alone, I am going to buy a used epyc server instead of one of these desktop things. I will be able to equip it with a greater amount of RAM as I see fit and run a greater range of models (albeit at lower speed). The ability to run larger models slowly at a later date is more important than the ability for me to run smaller models faster now. So I am an example of a consumer who does not like framework's tradeoff.
You would think that they would at least offer some type of service where they take it into the factory and refit it with new ram chips. Perhaps they could just buy used low-ram boards at a later date and use them to make refurbished high-ram boards.
Another solution is to make it so that it supports both soldered and unsoldered ram (but at a lower frequency). Gaming is frequency-limited but does not require much ram, but a lot of workloads like AI are bandwidth limited. Hell, if you're going to have some high-frequency RAM irreplacibly soldered to the motherboard, it might as well be a chiplet!
I don't know how large is framework's market, nor how deep their pockets are, which condition their ability to produce 2 different models.
It's clear that a modular design is preferable, hopefully once a standard emerges they will use it in their next devices. Perhaps framework will help in that process, but I don't know if they can afford to put up with the initial costs, particularly in a market they don't have a strong foothold yet.
Unless there's another company out there shipping this CPU with replaceable memory, I'll believe them. Even with LPCAMM, physics just doesn't work out.
Of course, there are plenty of slower desktops you can buy where all the memory can be swapped out. If you want a repairable desktop like that, you're not stuck with Framework in the same way you would be with laptops. You'll probably struggle to get the same memory bandwidth to make full use of AMD's chips, though.
* ASUS X870E ROG CROSSHAIR HERO AMD AM5 ATX Motherboard
I'd probably go Framework Desktop next if I won't need peripherals.
If you want the high memory bandwidth get the strix halo, if not get any normal PC. Sure apple has the bandwidth as well, and also soldered memory as well.
If you want dimms and you want the memory bandwidth get a threadripper (4 channel), siena (6 channel), thread ripper pro (8 channel), or Epyc (12 channel). But be prepared to double your power (at least), quadruple your space, double your cost, and still not have a decent GPU.
Quiet? A real PC with bigger fans = more airflow = quieter
Smaller - yes, this is the tradeoff
GPU is always best separate, that is true since the ages.
"double the power" oh no from 100W to 200W wowwww
"quadruple your space" - not a problem
You forget the value proposition of Framework products is not only they allow you to bring your own hardware but they also promise to provide you with replacement parts and upgrades directly from the vendor.
In this case they could not make the RAM replaceable (it’s a limitation of the platform) but you can expect an upgrade board in about 2 years that’s actually going to be easy to install for much less cost than buying a new desktop computer.
For instance, something having 100.200 points in one config, in another 100.220, with the bars/scales distorted to make that difference seem much larger.
Gaming the bar-game, so to speak.
> The AMD 395+ uses unified memory, like Apple, so nearly all of it is addressable to be used by the GPU.
There's probably some fairly strict timing requirements etc on that. Still it'd be nice if they figured out a way to have swappable RAM.
My take-away was/is that the Framework Desktop is a very nice machine, but it is expensive IMHO. You can get better performance at a lower price by building your own machine; in this article the 9950X scores lower than the Max 395, and I'm not entirely sure that's accurate – that wasn't my take-away at all (don't have links at the ready). This is also what you'd expect when comparing a 55W laptop chip vs. a 170W desktop chip.
That said, Linux compatibility is a bit of a pain, for example some MediaTek WiFi/Bluetooth chips that ASUS boards use don't have a Linux driver. In general figuring out what components to get is a bit time-consuming. In one of the videos Nirav mentioned that "just get the Framework Desktop" is so much easer, and 100% agree with that.
In the end, I decided to get a USB4/Thunderbold eGPU, which gives me more than enough gaming performance for me and is much cheaper. I already have a laptop that's more than performant enough for my needs, which I got last year mainly due to some idiotic JS build process I had to deal with last year that took forever on my old laptop. On the new machine it's merely "ludicrously slow". Sometimes I think JS people are in cahoots with Intel and/or AMD...
For LLM stuff the considerations might be different. I don't care about that so I didn't look into it.
There has been several projects started that are experimenting with this including Suricata and pfSense. I wonder how well this chip could handle packet inspection.
I dont think any enterprise is going to hand over the keys to its firewall any time soon.
A laptop CPU defeats the purpose. Get a 9800X3D for gaming will be waaaay faster or Threadripper for productivity or the 9950X3D chips with 16 cores/32 threads.
Why this laptop crap when you can get a nice PC case.
Then again he thinks the Fractal North was "bulky"? What?
Quiet? A real PC with bigger fans = more airflow = quieter
Smaller - yes, this is the tradeoff
Nix + Process Compose[0] make a great combo, and runs completely native.
Curious what will the long term impact of this be on the longtime viability of Basecamp and its sister/daughter brands.