Now the question is, what about those rumored Zen4 chips for a future “Steam Deck 2”? Pluton would make absolutely no sense for such a device and could subsequently make for an ideal Linux-focused processor if the design happens to be made available for others and not just Valve (I mean, even PS5’s APU has been sold on a sort of all-in-one PC motherboard, and the Steam Deck is more of a PC than the PS5 is).
Linus recently covered the HP 845 G9 repairable laptop that has an AMD Ryzen 6000 series CPU. I’m hoping we can see future iterations of the Framework laptops offer AMD processors.
The PS5 one is very rare and sadly with huge amounts of cut down I/O and bandwidth, they disabled the GPU too. Even if it was made available, it would be horrible for PC.
Maybe with the silicon oversupply, AMD might decide to give some silicon allocation here but really doubtful.
Also note that this is a user forum, so unless you want to hear a bunch of users guess at Framework’s plans you’ll need to contact support for an official response to your answer.
Don’t flood them either though! Having to answer 10 similar tickets with “They’re on our roadmap but far out” or something like that gets tiring. If you have a response just post a screenshot here!
To the best of anyone’s knowledge, the ball is in AMD’s court. Intel is very responsive to OEM’s needs, and AMD is mainly targeting larger, established OEMs. It sucks, but them’s the breaks, at least for now.
It also doesn’t help that Thunderbolt support largely just wasn’t there on AMD platforms.
Things have changed a bit, so hopefully we’ll see more options in the nearer future.
We are likely to see intels new 20A process (5nm) or maybe even a 3nm if we are lucky, before AMD support startup OEMs.
I have returned my framework just because of the intel chip. If however 14th or 15th gen sees massive improvements from the current 10nm chips, that will be the best of both worlds.
Supposedly Meteor Lake is tile based which brings power efficiency and cost efficiency. iGPU uses up to 192 EUs compared to the current 96. I suppose it is purely DDR5 but I guess there’s no choice because of bandwidth requirements.
Although Intel has a tile based server CPU, time will tell whether they can get it right (similar to first gen Ryzen), else we have to wait for Arrow Lake I guess.
Regarding the statement that AMD has not been competitive against Intel:
People seem to conveniently forget everything but single threaded performance when discussing this. The first mobile Ryzen APUs were already really good and I would choose that over the competing Intel APUs (Kaby Lake R at the time when Raven Ridge was released).
Why are people not talking about GPU performance, hardware acceleration, multithreaded performance?
The CPUs in AMD and Intel APUs are not too different, but the Intel GPU is so underpowered compared to the CPU performance. The AMD GPUs completely obliterate Intel in this regard.
AMD was already competitive at Raven Ridge (which was the first mobile APU named as the 2000-series). From there they made pretty nice performance and efficiency jumps for each new generation.
It takes several years for people to catch up to these things, reputation is too . It is kind of fascinating.
The power consumption, based on Notebookcheck reviews, comparing AMD and Intel APUs with similar CPU performance - AMD does pretty well. And again, the Intel GPUs cannot even begin to compare. Which is, along with multithreaded performance, why I would rather have AMD over Intel even in the Raven Ridge days.
Modern Intel Xe iGPUs are very competitive with Ryzen 5000 and below Vega iGPUs, its only recently with RDNA2 iGPUs in some 6000 chips that AMD has pulled ahead again in graphics
On a note, I wonder how would Intel 14th Gen Meteor Lake go, considering it is chiplet, so you get power efficiency, and the iGPU is gonna be based on Arc GPUs. I doubt it would be good as RDNA2 iGPUs in gaming, probably better than Vega and Xe but I am kinda hopeful for encoding and compute tasks.
The one to keep an eye on is Arrow Lake. If it comes out on time, it’s iGPU capabilities will be significantly improved. I expected the low-end dGPU market to vanish overnight. GT 1030 and GTX 1650 will become irrelevant. Especially if AMD brings a competitive product to the desktop market as they historically have.
