13th Gen Intel® Core™ and AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series join the Framework Laptop 13 family

Did the new motherboards got a RTC battery or rechargeable?

@dimitris I understand your concern with the RTC.

But in my mind, a ‘hot backup’ needs to be up to date anyway, so for any hot backup machine, I simply take it our every two weeks on a Sunday, leave it plugged in for 2 hours and update the OS.

That way, if I ever need to use it, it is immediately useful.

And while not needed, I also do a ‘git pull’ on all my repositories as a sanity check that the machine is ready to go.

In contrast to a true replacement machine, I travel with a Chromebook as an emergency backup. It would really suck to have a machine stop working while on a longer trip.

I confess to some level of paranoia - but Andy Grove wrote a book about it.

Good luck with your backup machine. 11th gen Intel is plenty powerful enough to do most work. (Maybe video editing suffers, etc.)

Bluto

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Hi @Bluto - no need to “confess” to paranoia, there’s some of that behind my backup strategy :slight_smile:

I guess I’m giving less priority to the “dropped my laptop” failure mode, and more to the “backpack got stolen/airbnb was broken into” one. In that latter case any backup devices would probably get lost at the same time as the primary.

So I think this requires some kind of “remote” storage of the backup, at least when traveling for more than ~ 1 week. Of course I risk some downtime (2-3 days end to end to get trusted third party to overnight backup to me) for this. Anyway, it’s here that the RTC becomes a bit of a showstopper.

BTW, I’m not even sure if plugging into AC for ~ 2h every 2 weeks would actually keep the RTC battery from a long term discharging trajectory.

Re: backups and “freshness”, remote cloud-hosted backup (already in place) should cover this if I have to break the glass. Goes without saying that regular testing of this is required to verify.

@dimitris
Yep - many scenarios would result in both machines ‘lost’.

My actual config is a ‘thin client’ 99% of my files are cloud stored. While this may raise some insults, I have found Dropbox to be the winner in cloud-via-rclone. Google drive is in last place ;-(

All functional files are in the cloud on Dropbox or in github. And I have bootstrap scripts. In the worst-case-scenario, I go to a local store, buy a chromebook, and in a few hours, I am operational. Chromebook is my default emergency solution because there are lower cost options, I can make it work with 8GB RAM and there is 95%++ chance of Linux working right away - albeit a generic Debian build. But it works.

I can have Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, VS Code, SSH, DBeaver and Slack running within an hour.

The biggest compromise using Chromebook is that the default Chrome in ChromeOS does not support Profiles (insert random swearwords in your preferred patois).

So I install Chrome (again) in Debian Linux and that supports the profiles I need. The same with Slack (who would think that Chromebook users want Slack???). I install it in Linux and it works fine.

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17 mA h × 3 V = 51 mW h, not 54 mW. While the number is reasonably close, the units are wrong. Also, dimitris appears to be specifically referring to using an unmodified 11th gen as a backup, in which case the main battery capacity is not relevant.

Unfortunately, it does seem like a potential problem more generally: the effects of the RTC flaw may show up more frequently as people upgrade, and 11th gen mainboards sit unused for longer periods. When I upgrade, I’ll probably keep my old mainboard running, but if people have one sitting around for a few months after upgrading before they decide what to do with it, it’s likely not going to work well.

(Somewhat off-topic, it appears that Discord replaces narrow non-breaking spaces and hair spaces with full size breaking spaces?)

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Thank you for everything y’all are doing and listening to us. I’m very happy that a matte screen option will be available and have already signed up for that. I’m also going to get the new battery and hinge stuff. Unfortunately since I’m running FreeBSD (and want to stick with it), I’m limited to using the original 11th gen machines (batch 6). It’s still working well and FreeBSD support for that machine is continuing to improve. Upgrading to a 12th gen or 13th gen would mean losing more support again at the operating system level (even if FreeBSD is still making progress on those fronts). So I’ll continue to use the 11th gen for now and just make upgrades on the other parts of the machine.

The 16th inch framework option is also something that interests me. I wonder if you will have the option to get the 16th inch shell but allow one to take the mainboard out of the 13" 11th gen machine and basically “upgrade the size of the machine” like that. I don’t see any limitations why someone won’t be able to do that, you would just need to allow the shell and 16" screen to be sold separately.

@TheTwistgibber is there any technical reason why AMD users can’t get better 80dB speakers? And same question about glossy screen?

Other than that i think frame.work laptops are really great products. I just don’t understand reason why this limitations in what CPU and speaker or CPU and display can be ordered together.

@Tomas Laptops are manufactured/built at the factory with all of the components pre-installed in certain SKUs (Stock Keeping Units). Allowing the level of configurability and SKU diversity you’ve mentioned increases the complexity, timing, resourcing requirements, storage costs, inventory levels, and the entire cost of the pipeline. We do not build-to-order at this time, and perhaps when we are are larger company, with with bigger margins, and manufacturing lines dedicated to custom work, this will be possible, but we are quite a ways from that being a reality.

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@fearedbliss Unfortunately, that is an dramatic oversimplification of what would be required given the internal design of the Framework 16 vs Framework 13. If you review the Framework 16 sneak peek videos and what we’ve already shared publicly, you’ll see that there would be significant hurdles to overcome to allow plug-and-play functionality and backwards compatibility with Framework 13 mainboards. Who knows what the future holds, but the Framework 13 and Framework 16 are unique products. Should cross-compatibility of chassis-dependent core components be possible in the future, we’ll let the Community know.

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@TheTwistgibber thanks for answer it makes sence.

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Wish I could get a AMD framework, but I NEED it before school. Any news on how 13th gen battery life and performance is?

No chance on getting a used <200$ thinkpad/latitude or something to bridge the couple months? Or hell borrow a laptop from someone?

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Is there any mention about the 13th gen supporting ReBAR if we want to use Intel graphics cards externally?

I’d love to be able to order the 61Wh battery for the AMD version as well. Extra juice is extra juice.

Have we confirmed the specific CPUs that are being used for the AMD lineup?
Based on what I’ve found on AMD’s website, there are only three 7040-series CPUs:

  • Ryzen 5 7640HS (6-core, up to 5.0GHz boost clock)
  • Ryzen 7 7840HS (8-core, up to 5.1GHz boost clock)
  • Ryzen 9 7940HS (8-core, up to 5.2GHz boost clock)

(All three CPUs have a configurable TDP from 35–54W)
Since we know there’s one Ryzen 5 SKU and one Ryzen 7 SKU, I guess that means the CPUs are the 7640HS and 7840HS? If that is confirmed, it’s be nice to see information directly on the configuration page regarding core-count and boost clocks like the Intel lineup has.

We have to wait … → Apr30/May01
my guess

  • Framework 13: Ryzen 7040U SKU 15W
  • Framework 16: Ryzen 7840HS SKU 35-40W
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Wow that’s faster than I thought. When is batch 1 shipping again?

Sometime in May

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Nice, reviews coming :smiley:

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Q3 for AMD.

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