The R&D cost for that processor was much higher than this one would theoretically be just because that processor involved the entire framework laptop as R&D.
I dont think there are enough benchmarks at the moment but the Snapdragon Elite probably beats most of Framework’s offerings already so this SoC being slower isn’t saying much.
Edit: Also, I’m putting it here to update the thread on the status of Arm SoCs and I’m hoping someone at Framework will look into some of these new options (even if they don’t go anywhere).
Generally, yes?
It’s a general-purpose CPU and GPU benchmark, so it shouldn’t be taken as gospel the same way any general-purpose benchmark shouldn’t be taken as gospel, but they do show what workloads they’re measuring. You also have to browse a bit carefully because the results are user-measured and there are a lot of reasons why a machine might not benchmark at its peak performance (IE if you search for Framework, you can pretty quickly see that for each CPU, there are a clump of slightly slower results that are presumably on battery power).
For what it’s worth, I used to share your general optimism about all ARM SBCs and I still own a lot, but I realized they were in a different performance category when I picked up a Thinkpad X13S with a Snapdragon 8cx (which is what Qualcomm was selling before they bought Nuvia and made the Snapdragon Elite with their core design) and abruptly discovered there’s a reason why those machines are showing up on eBay basically new for 1/3 or less of the MSRP. They’re slow enough that it’s a problem in regular usage.
Results from that machine at Lenovo Thinkpad X13s - Geekbench
More generally, the space of ARM CPUs right now seems to be sharply divided between all the vendors that are building chips around ARM’s reference core designs and Apple and Qualcomm that are making their own core designs. ARM’s reference designs do not appear to be competitive with the x86 space the way Apple and Qualcomm’s designs are. Rumor seems to be that we’ll be seeing AMD, Nvidia, and Samsung rolling out their own core designs as well.
I plan to run Debian Linux, so it shouldn’t be too slow for browser tasks. I don’t expect it to video edit or seriously game. I am not looking for a high end desktop-replacement. I’m looking for a netbook that I can remote into my desktop PC for anything that needs compute. It needs to outperform the Intel Celeron version of the Acer Chromebook R752T.
The announcement of the Framework laptop 12 made me super excited. The ultimate thing for me might be that with an arm SoC.
Is Framework going to work with any manufacturer to provide an ARM64 mainboard?
A year ago I’d say I think Raspberry Pi Co. would be a natural fit for that, if they can find the time in their busy day. But they do tend to be very focused on their own stuff.
Maybe a better fit would be Nvidia, which could provide a modified Jetson as a mainboard, with an AI processor. NVIDIA Jetson Nano
Considering they are leaning hard into their partnership with AMD and they literally just had an announcement positioning the FW Desktop as a competitor to DIGITS along with a host of other reasons, I seriously doubt any kind of partnership with NVIDIA is in the cards.
@GhostLegion Competitor against DIGITS? Do they realize it’s rated a 1 PetaFLOPS? It’s designed to run the big-boy models (200B). It has a 512-bit memory bus and probably 500 GB/s memory bandwidth. That beats the M4 Max and I don’t think AMD will ever come close.
Going up against DIGITS isn’t like battling Intel back in the day. Nvidia isn’t complacent.
I said they positioned it as such. I claim no expertise in how to run AI models or hardware requirements needed. Just that FW is positioning it as a competitor.
AMD has gone back and forth and has even produced a few arm chips. I heard some news recently that AMD was considering arm once again so maybe they could produce an AMD arm mainboard for the Framework? (This is mostly wisful thinking.)
I would probably still be okay with that. My use case is light whereas benchmarks are usually testing peak performance. I’d need to see a test with the power consumption so I could judge the difference in battery life based on power draw.
Also, the benchmark is a little suspicious since it labels the Radxa chip Processor I’d as “ARMv8 (64-bit) Family 8 Model D81 Revision 1”
Edit: it seems Geekbench labels ARMv9 the same for almost all SoCs. I guess they’re just running ARMv8 software since it’s fully compatible with ARMv9
Here is a better comparison with both systems running Debian and the Radxa barely wins (ties) multi-core and Framework 1135G7 wins single-core by about 56% (Radxa is 64% the single-core perf of the 1135G7 so 1135G7 is 156% the perf of Radxa and therefore 56% faster).
Edit: here’s the comparison:
Edit 2: this comparison has basically matching (16 GB) memory between the systems:
Sounds like you want a PineBook Pro which already exists and launched in 2022
I want an ARM machine in the Framework laptop chassis that is actually competitive and I could transfer my entire workload (which mostly consists of compiling for aarch64 targets anyway) onto and not notice a difference coming from a Ryzen 9 5950X workstation, and in that respect the Snapdragon X Elite is extremely impressive for what it has to offer. It in fact would make my life easier since I wouldn’t ever again have to touch cross-compilation or other janky setups!
Certainly also looking forward to what the upcoming 2nd generation chips have to offer and hoping to see actual competition from other vendors also spring up so Qualcomm isn’t alone in providing competent (compared to high-end x86 mobile offerings) performance CPU cores for laptops.
Agreed. I made the mistake of purchasing a pinebook pro back in the day and they shipped an NVMe adapter board that literally did not fit inside the laptop. People were cutting off the end of the board or attaching their SSDs with tape. What kind of company does literally zero testing on a product before shipping? If anyone had attempted to put that board in the laptop, they would have seen that it does not fit. I’m done with everything ever made by pine64.
