Regarding this, I wonder if we could find a way to fit the Honeycomb LX2 by Solidrun into the Framework, I would think outside of Apple Silicon and perhaps Snapdragons, this is the closest we can get to a modern computing system . It even has PCIe lanes and socketed DDR4 RAM SODIMMs for use. Perhaps the only concern is the GPU.
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Are there any plans to introduce ARM CPUs to the framework line up? Would love the opportunity to create a framework laptop with an ARM processor setup
This may come as kinda janky but I saw a few posts recently and these just linked up:
We get a RK3588S Single board computer (we need a low profile one or even a Banana Pi/Orange Pi core board) with some kind of cooler fan (not sure passive cooling works).
The reason for it is because it comes with a decent GPU for graphical acceleration yet probably a somewhat powerful enough ARM CPU chip that I think is easier to find, the other spectrum would be Snapdragons and Apple ARM but I remember the latter would definitely be more powerful but kinda closed and very expensive.
Then a PCB to connect the keyboard and touchpad to the SBC:
We connect the Framework display to the SBC via this PCB:
These two solutions seems reasonably low profile enough to fit into the Framework chassis.
So currently, what we are missing is:
- How to connect the speakers/mic and audio jack board.
- How do we connect the webcam.
- How to connect an NVMe drive (so far all low profile RK3588 SBCs aren’t, at least I couldn’t find one, all uses some kind of eMMC flash or SD Card, I remember it supports up to PCIe 2.0 though).
- USB extenders for some IO (might have to 3D print the expansion cards then get some extenders to the USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports, there’s not a lot of IO on such an SBC anyway).
- How to connect the battery and maybe a PCB to charge?
One idea for the SBC is we could crowdfund Firefly/Solidrun/Khadas/Radxa/Mekotronics/Pine64 (I am not sure if Orange/Banana Pi and other makers would) to make one for us but I have no idea how much that would cost. The bootloader support is another question. Though if we have to make a custom board, we might as well, make a whole new mainboard that is compatible with the current Framework chassis with socketed DDR4 sodimms.
Another way would be to custom make some kind of carrier mainboard like the Nexdock that connects to Framework’s components while connecting to a core board module.
Maybe someone with more technical expertise would give more input here?
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There aren’t premade options for these, but electrically they’re less complex than you might expect. The hardware side would be… pretty smooth? To make a bunch of break-out boards.
The audio board is just a jack that takes analog audio plus the hall effect sensor to see if the screen is closed. Just get analog audio out of your SBC in your preferred way, even just wire up the SBC’s jack.
The webcam is USB 2.0 (but with 3.3V power instead of 5V), just pull the right signals out of the cable. Microphone looks to be i2s audio, and the automatic light sensor seems to be i2c with extra pin for interrupt.
Once you have the signal lanes for PCIe exposed, I think it’s just as simple as providing power to the NVMe drive and hooking up the PCIe lines (and maybe the i2c sideband?). It gets more complex if you want to support SATA but this is complex enough already, thanks. If your chosen board doesn’t have PCIe exposed, you’re plum out of luck unless you use a USB adapter, or just boot off the eMMC, that stuff’s pretty decent actually.
USB extensions can be as simple as a cable, althought you’d need to be able to fit it through the USB-C sized holes in the laptop chassis to dummy-proof it. Alternatively, you could just specify that Only This Module Goes In That Slot for each of the slots.
Battery though, that’s a bit rough. Not impossible by any means, but battery management has to be customized to the battery it’s managing and the connector the battery uses. And then having the SBC be aware of the battery? An entirely separate problem that goes deep into the software side of things.
My concern regarding the PCIe NVMe was that eMMC is kinda slower (I used a laptop that used eMMC) and lower durability, not to mention I don’t remember it was swappable. The ability to boot off would probably require a workaround or BIOS mod.
Yea, it wouldn’t be off the shelf boards, so one way I hypothesized above is that if there is sufficient interest, we could get a huge custom designed daughter board PCB to fit the SBC.
The batttery could potentially require a secondary controller too.
Just throwing out ideas to make it a reality.
No I mean many SBCs already have an eMMC onboard or the option to have one. Just use it, forget external boot storage.
I mean like if we are gonna add so many daughter boards and extensions, why not 
There’s an RK3588S tablet by Fyde on Indiegogo now.
Maybe we would see a revised PineBook Pro with the RK3588S, or even a mainboard that fits with a Framework, though the RK3588S pales compared to Snapdragons and Apple Silicon sadly.
I wonder if Google’s work with their Tensor ARM mobile chips and them working with Framework on the Chromebooks could bring the Tensor chips as an option as a Framework Pixel Book in the future.
That would be really cool.
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I believe Framework should not deal with ARM if they can’t get SODIMMs for RAM
that has nothing to do with ARM, its up to whoever manufacturers the boards and the chips. ARM just design the cores.
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I know that, but you can get the point to what I’m reffering
I was thinking if we could get the chips from Google for Tensor, but getting socketed SODIMMS may or may not be possible.
There are socketed ARM systems like the SolidRun’s HoneyComb LX2k and Amazon’s Graviton, but those are far and few.
It would be cool if we can get a decently high performance ARM processor with socketed SODIMMs though.
How about something based on Nvidia Jetson modules? Those have RAM and some flash directly soldered on, but have support for standard PCIe, NVME, M2 wifi modules, MIPI, etc
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I think it would be the same as those RK3588 and similar single board computers, the ports can be quite thick, and many daughter boards required too.
When it’s ready. ARM support is lacking everywhere.
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it’s not even the fact that there is just one maker outside of apple (qualcomm) but right now there is just a single model (snapdragon 8cx gen3) of arm chip that one can consider, and that model can’t even compete with apple’s M1 (let alone the later ones).
there are rumors about gen 4 being an insane improvement (let’s assume it is, which we don’t know), but even if framework manages to strike a deal with qualcomm to produce a motherboard to be delivered around gen 4’s launch date, i doubt it’d be before 2024.
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I just saw this laptop which has a carrier board innards for a SBC?
I was wondering is the pinout of these Computer-on-Module standardised?
If they are, perhaps we can build some kind of carrier board that can be upgraded or something.
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The Raspberry Pi 4 CM uses a pair of high density 100 pin connectors for connection to IO.
This is using a MXM-3 edge connector to connect the CM to IO. This does not appear to be a RPi compatible CM module.
Most interestingly this appears to be using Louis Rossman’s favorite fan placement strategy.
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Hi, I just discovered this company and i think it’s great to be able to update/replace parts of the laptop, so my next one will probably be a Framework laptop (with linux).
Quick question; I saw there are for now just x86-64 cpus available. If in the future Framework delivers ARM “packs”, do you think will be enough by replacing just the mainboard? All the other hardware could work with both arm and x86-64 cpus? If that’s possible would be super great.
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