AMD CPUs please

Framework Laptop 13
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It is when you lack any evidence and evidence points to the contrary. Why would Framework explicitly state they were open to the idea of multiple board partners if they were contractually obligated to not do that? AMD never responded to inquires, that isn’t Intel blocking AMD, that’s AMD not responding.

I’m not denying the past, it is well-documented. Intel is not in the market position they once were, they can ill-afford to be seen as bullying AMD, especially when AMD has quite the competitive product as evidenced by clear allocation issues.

TL;DR you have no evidence for this theory and evidence points to other issues being at fault for no AMD at present.

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Linus would have been told about that before he put them in contact with AMD.
He’s said on video that he’s been in contact with AMD about framework.

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I never said it was the case, I merely threw it out as one possible reason of many. ‘Open to working with other board partners’ could just as easily mean ARM or RISC-V or even OpenPOWER, pies that Intel has no fingers in and no reason to bribe/coerce OEMs to avoid.

The most likely reason is simply that Intel has their own fab plants and AMD does not and therefore has to compete with every other semiconductor manufacturer for the limited fab capacity, especially limited by the fact that most of the fab plants can’t work at the 5nm scale that AMD now uses. AMD have to pick and choose who they sell their limited supplies to and unfortunately for us, Framework doesn’t have the buying power to be up that list.

Supply chain issues and chairman Xi waving guns at Taiwan (where TMSC is based) don’t help at all either. It’s literally been a perfect storm over the last few years and that’s not likely to go away any time soon.

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A lost sale is a lost sale no matter to whom the sale is lost. Intel has every reason to persuade partners to use Intel over RISC/ARM/OpenPOWER.

Like I said, the problem is most likely allocation

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Webcams…don’t think many people really care about webcam image quality in daily scrums (and your face will be scaled down anyway…most people’s faces aren’t worth my screen’s real estate). And if they do…there’s the Insta360 Link.

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I :100: do, I hate looking at my grainy face. 1080p still looks terrible to me. probably just how bad webcams are tho I think. I have an external 1080p logitech cam that I have lying around and I recall the image quality being much better than the integrated webcams that advertise 1080p

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Yup, the laptop webcams are shocking.
Even a half decent front camera from a phone would be better.
Good thing there are apps to use you phone as an IP cam.

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…Thing about webcams is that it’s for others to look at your grainy face…not you. :sweat_smile:

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I just wanted to point out that almost all the handheld brands have 6000 series versions coming out now/in the very near future:

  • AYA’s AYANEO 2 w/ a 6800U is actually targeted for a September launch

  • The GPD Win Max 2 starts shipping their preorders this month as well - what’s interesting about it, is that it’s actually a pretty decent 10" netbook form factor (with a great port selection, up to 32GB of RAM. (Those are sold out now and the next batch is scheduled for November delivery.)

  • AOKZOE got their first batch of 3000+ 6800U chips delivered early last month.

  • AYN’s Loki Max 6800U model will be shipping their first 500 units starting Nov 30.

It appears that smaller Chinese companies have been more agile in taking delivery of smaller quantities, having short lead times, and doing small run manufacturing (in the thousands or hundreds of units) I don’t think this works as well for regular laptop manufacturers (which typically plan a year or more in advance). In the US, for example, the Asus and Lenovo are the only companies that just in the past month seem to have Ryzen 6000U models in stock/available for immediate delivery (I check on HP’s EliteBooks the other day and those are still not shipping until November).

There are also a few other interesting tidbits… In July, Schenker/Tuxedo Computing announced their PF5NU1G refresh, the Via 15 Pro/Pulse 15 Gen 2 and in their reddit announcement addressed why they were using 5700Us not a Ryzen 6000:

First of all: Supply! Ryzen 6000 supply is very limited globally and our hardware producers only receive a very limited amount of Ryzen 6000 CPUs, which are not enough for different products. So they had to decide which products will get this Ryzen-H-supply and they decided to go for gaming laptops because it’s a bigger market compared to the rather niche category of non-dGPU laptops with high-end CPU.

However, all this was from before PC demand collapsed… someone just pointed out to me a Chinese video review of a new Mechrevo Code 01 2022 which has a 6800H. Sure enough, on JD, you can buy it now - a 6800H with a 64GB (2 x DDR-4800 SODIMMs) going for ~$1000 (USD) - now interestingly, this is using a very different chassis (16:10, 500g heavier). Mechrevo is Tong Fang’s (ODM) first party brand. Interesting that what was completely unavailable a few months ago, is now on the market and being sold in China by the same ODM. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(My guess is that while Ryzen 6000 is on FP7 and 7000 will be FP8, since DDR5 and USB4 are the hardest things to sort out, the ODM was probably already working on a new board design, and took advantage of a sudden glut of chip availability as a local market pipe cleaner for their new designs.)

For most laptop manufacturers though, even if there is suddenly more availability, can they take advantage of chips w/o months of design/planning already in the bag (doubtful), and would they want to invest into that with mobile Ryzen 7000 announcements coming next January (also doubtful). For Framework, there’s the added layer that with their expansion module system, they need 4 rock-solid USB4 ports on both sides of the boards (that requires at least a retimer), whereas AMD was still working on just getting the USB4 to work reliably at all well into the summer.

Also, a note on scale, Mercury Research estimates AMD pushing up to about 25% of mobile market share recently (and growing even in the downturn). IDC estimates about 60M laptops shipped/quarter, so AMD is delivering something on the order of 15M chips per quarter. Total sales for all these niche companies (including Framework) are basically rounding errors.

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I don’t think people consciously care. It’s just yet another data point people use to make subjective decisions about you and your work. Given that it’s 2022, it just seems like the weirdest corner to cut. It probably costs 5 bucks to put in a better webcam but every other manufacturer skimps on it.

Yeah, it’s a good option. Although, the Framework cam is decent and built-in, requiring less set up for meetings, which is good when I’m inhaling Chicken Tikka 2 minutes before my next meeting.

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That could explain why, for example, Aya has been churning out so many handhelds.

However, if that is the case, then does Framework need to have a liaison in China to engage in that same kind of collaboration with parts vendors or would that be too far outside of their scope, you think? They are still a relatively new company in relation to Asus or Lenovo, but they are also a laptop maker, and Aya and AYN are gaming handheld companies, that produce tightly-integrated portable devices and those systems don’t lend themselves to easy repairability.

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One thing to keep in mind regarding Ryzen 6000 vs 5000 on these gaming handhelds is that the iGPU improvement on Ryzen 6000 via RDNA2 is a big enough improvement that it alone can make or break your device (see also: Steam Deck also uses RDNA2 and, when it launched, had iGPU performance far and above anything else).

So, in theory, these handheld game systems makers could very well want to pull out all of the stops and jump through any hoops possible just to make it happen.

But on a laptop, the benefit is nowhere need as great since, as much as I prefer integrated graphics, any laptop focusing on gaming would just go straight for using a discrete GPU anyway.

And keep in mind that, at this time, AMD is supposedly putting a lot of focus into improving their gaming-related mindshare since, let’s be honest, tackling productivity-related mindshare means tackling CUDA which… hoo boy that’d be a monumental task that seems more easily tackled by supersceding the concept of GPGPU altogether via the use of various accelerators/DSPs/FPGAs/“AI accelerators”/etc. integrated right onto the CPU (something that even Intel is working towards) considering AMD’s acquisition of Xilinx.

Anyway, with all of that being said, there’s also the niggle of Pluton on Ryzen 6000 mobile which Microsoft requires the 3rd Party Certificate to be disabled by default if you ship Windows pre-installed on a device with Pluton. The great irony though in that using something like SteamOS would require re-enabling the 3rd party certificate but, at least on my own 4800U OneXPlayer, the amount of settings you can change in the BIOS really is basically non-existent (even more non-existent than most OEM PCs!).

You want to talk about weird corners to cut, here’s one for you - AFAICT every multi-thousand dollar TV with an ethernet port uses a 100mbps ethernet port; even the integrated wifi is faster, though people have figured out that you can commonly use a USB ethernet adapter on these TVs for faster-than-100mbps speeds.

I have a freakin Asus EeePC 1000H netbook with a 1st gen Intel Atom N270 + Intel 945GMA that has gigabit ethernet! Actually, I don’t know of any computer motherboard (laptop or desktop) made in the last 15 years with an ethernet port that isn’t at least gigabit.

My only guess as to why this is relates to TV’s use of mobile-focused SOCs which 99.99% of the time are used in mobile devices or general embedded systems. Obviously mobile devices don’t even have room for an ethernet port, and a lot of embedded systems tend to use ethernet more for logging and diagnostic purposes. Honestly, if those SOCs didn’t include ethernet (there was a recent SOC, maybe a mediatek? that I looked at a data sheet for and, sure enough, it listed ethernet at 100mbps), I wouldn’t be surprised if TV manufacturers would simply not even include ethernet at all.

…though LG made their own SOC as of 2019 (hence why they have HDMI 2.1 on all 4 ports), so they’ve much less of an excuse.

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They would have contacts in the region, because that’s where the boards are made.

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7th gen HP microserver uses a broadcom nic that has no support for jumbo frames. it would have cost fractions of a cent to use one that does. IIRC the one they used was the one model that doesn’t support jumbo frames out of like half a dozen that do.

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I mean, I get that one. There’s just no need for more than 100Mbit/s currently on a TV. For reference, Netflix currently recommends a bandwidth of 15Mbit/s for 4k content. Even if they quadruple the frame rates in the future, that would only bring the bandwidth requirement to 60Mbit/s. A more expensive part simply does not provide any difference to the end user in this case for the foreseeable future, except for extremely niche use cases like copying terabytes of video over your lan.

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In theory yes, but in practice no as there are already people that have reported buffering issues using the internal 100mbps LAN that see their problems go away when using a higher bandwidth connector.

There’s also the funny thing that, as mentioned in Vincint’s video, Sony’s own BRAVIO CORE streaming service, regardless of how uncommonly used it is, actually recommends a connection of 115mbps minimum to access the highest quality video stream.

Also, when we’re talking TVs that can cost $3000+, I question the validity of excluding things considered “niche”, not to mention how there doesn’t even seem to be one TV that has it at all. It’s not unheard of to at least hear of in consumer electronics that will cater to specific niches, or expensive ones intended to “do everything”, yet there’s nothing.

All of this did remind me of another weird corner that was cut - LG’s 2019 OLED series seemed to be one of the last high-end TVs that supported DTS over HDMI, but now basically no high-end TV does and only supports Dolby. What good is HDMI’s eARC if you’re not going to support all of the audio formats anyway?

…of course there’s also the question of why audio formats in the TV world are so proprietary when there have been both lossless and lossy FOSS audio with capabilities commonly exceeding those of proprietary formats for over a decade now (even in terms of Atmos, WavPack has at least support for 256 channels and, spec wise, up to 4096 or 8192)

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From my understanding, Framework at this point in time doesn’t have the needed engineers and motivation to produce an AMD edition. If you don’t know, they do prioritize at this moment Intel Core 13th gen CPUs in their planing over AMD 7000 due to RAM. 13th gen has still ddr4 support, while AMD 7000 doesn’t and from what I have read, they will update the RAM type only when it will not be possible to get the older one.

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I love this idea, this company, and this design.

I will not buy Intel. Their Performance Per Watt is abysmal and only getting worse ATM.

Please please please make an AMD option.

I have the cash on hand to buy one, that is not a problem.

I am looking to buy an upgrade to my existing laptop to a lighter, modular, and right to repair friendly laptop.

I am tired of the options we get with the ‘big & boutique’ vendors.

The problem is the fact I will not support the current gen of Intel parts that are too power hungry and absolutely are terrible performance compared to their AMD counterparts.

I really want to support you as a company.

I very much hope you will make something with an AMD 6x or 7x Mobile chip.

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I think you’ve bought into the marketing a little too much. I won’t deny that Intel isn’t as power-efficient at lower power levels but it is more performant. At higher power levels (60W or so) Intel is actually more efficient than AMD but that’s irrelevant since these are 28W processors. Either way, its not like Intel is an all around worse option, it just is in battery life and in graphics performance and it does compete with ryzen 5000 in graphics…just not 6000.

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When it comes to making a purchasing decision on a laptop, whilst I think performance and efficiency are important, some perspective is needed.

Until I bought my Framework (11th Gen Intel), I’d been using a Lenovo T440p with an i7 after-market CPU upgrade that was never officially supported (and is outside of the thermal design). This is 4th-gen Haswell stuff.

I still like that laptop. It still ticks the boxes of things I need a laptop to do. It’s not like the early 2000’s where each generation brought us huge leaps in performance and efficiency.

Yes, I would like an AMD option and there is more performance to be had if such an option existed, but to completely disregard Intel as an option would only hurt me. Intel couldn’t give a damn if I did or didn’t buy a (to them) cheap CPU. I’m not “sticking it to them” by refusing to buy.

I bought a Framework knowing that it didn’t have “the best” performance or all-day battery life. I don’t need those things.

I get good performance, great features and it was a very good price for what I got.

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