AMD 7040 U series or HS for Framework 16

Framework Laptop 16
#1

I was wondering what direction the community thought Framework would go for the Ryzen CPUs for the Framework 16. It seems unlikely they will offer 4 SKUs (Ryzen 5/7 U series, and Ryzen 5/7 HS series) as they’ve mentioned in the past that having too many configurations made it difficult for them logistically. So do you think Framework will go for better battery life with the U series, or go with the better gaming/performance with HS?

I personally just want any configuration that allows for 8 hours of battery use so I don’t have to bring my charger to work. If I can get it with HS, i’ll take it, but don’t mind going to a U if it helps me reach that benchmark.

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#2

You can just turn down the power limit of the hs to get a u, they are literally the same die slightly different settings.

Main difference is how high it can go, downwards they are pretty much the same.

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#3

More like hx/hs? U variant wont make sense in a 16inch as it will bottleneck the gpu, though its mostly only about the wattage limit on about the same chip.

As the egpu is essentially a seperate part, they should be able to handle amd+amd/amd+nvidia &intel +nvidia (not relying on a single provider to ensure some completition on cost though amd cpu variants will likely sell better)

#4

Imo the 7045hx ones make a bit too many sacrifices (the chiplett+io-die setup murders idle power and battery life to a point where even intel beats it), better to leave the really high core count option to the intel sku and have a 7040hs in the amd 16inch.

Ideally they’d have both cause plugged in the 7045hx look like they have monster performance but the battery life is a bit sad.

But I am not buying a 16 inch, it’s too big for me so I have no stakes in this.

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#5

I think HS/HX makes the most logical sense. Look at it this way, HS/HX is made for gamers/creativity, U is made for longer battery. They are already adding a dedicated GPU which means gamers/creativity will be the main crowd for that. For those who want longer battery life, replacing the GPU with an extra battery would get you more battery life than most U laptops

So in my opinion, HS/HX makes the most sense

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#6

I’d have to kinda disagree, U is for devices with less cooling capacity, HS is for devices with more cooling capacity and HX is for devices with a lot of cooling capacity that doesn’t care about battery.

A u and hs will consume exactly the same ammount of power doing low intensity stuff, main difference is how much they can draw doing high intensity stuff and that is configurable.

7840u, 7840hs and z1 extreme are the same silicon with different settings (and the 7640u/hs i the same silicon with a bunch of stuff turned off).

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#7

+1 for HS > U, but the bottlenecking concern really isn’t that present unless you’re trying to go to max settings. I run arguably the worst configuration for an eGPU (i5, single channel memory), and the only game I’ve found that won’t run flawlessly on medium settings is Elden Ring (albeit that’s probably an optimization thing more than a bottleneck thing). I don’t know enough about mainline laptop-only gaming to know if max settings is a majority want, but I do know that 8 lanes and the stupid amount of cores that new CPUs have will cut any potential bottleneck in half.

Best of luck to anyone who takes the plunge with a future NVIDIA expansion bay and Linux though. My Linux eGPU journey took two years and six tries for the kernel to get to a state where it would work and then for me to get the knowledge to make it work.

#8

Would be cool to see a HS option, but as Adrian points out, the whole device then has to be engineered for that higher cooling requirement. And from our glances at early samples in current marketing, they’ve already engineered most of this - the time for making decisions on how much heat it’ll be able to dissipate was probably 2 years ago.

I’m sure I saw someone hinting at the expansion bay having a big thumping cooler module option. Funny how that aligns with this idea… for GPU purposes that would lock you into the on-chip module or else an external GPU.

#9

7040U and 7040HS are the exact same silicon. The only difference is the max sustained power, which is around 30 W for 7040U and 35 W or above for 7040HS. Artificially limiting power draw is pretty meaningless, unless it is for battery life reasons, in which case it should just be a toggle, not an eternal power limit cap. And because they are the same silicon, they will get basically the same battery life.

#10

One of it’s sacrifices is the new RDNA3 iGPU which many people are looking forward to.

#11

That, the idle power, and the built in usb4