More of a discussion post, but I was wondering what the community thought about this as a concept.
Intel’s EVO line of CPUs has seemingly brought significantly greater battery efficiency to the laptops that have them so far. Granted they are not exactly power house’s but neither is the Framework. If the team was able to source their next line of Intel CPUs to prioritize efficiency over straight up power, I think it would lead to a greatly improved experience for many users.
I am all for keeping a dedicated GPU out of the Framework, as unpopular of an opinion as that may be because I believe a dedicated GPU would make the overall experience worse for a lot of us, even if we’re plugged in all the time. eGPU support exists (I use one myself) for anyone with a heavy need for graphics in their workflow or for community members that want to game using their framework, though with the CPU bottleneck you’re not going to want to use too beefy of a GPU anyway.
Again just wanted to get the conversation started here, but I’m definitely all for the team sourcing higher efficiency CPUs, making the battery life go from palatable to excellent and keeping overall processing power relatively consistent. So far running the i5 skew with 64gb RAM (overkill I know), and a Gen 4 PCI-E SSD, my performance in anything non-graphical is never disappointing (programming, browsing, media consumption, communication, word processing, etc.).
The only thing about the framework that feels truly lacking enough to point out as the most significantly in need of improvement in my opinion, is the battery life. And I think going for efficiency over power in the next run of processors would be a key decision in helping with that area of the laptop.
Cheers!
G