With the rise of AMD APU in PS5 and XBOX and now Steam Deck abd Asus Rog Ally…
Isn t Framework heading in the wrong direction ???
Another possible future would be a 100Watt APU
The new 16" inch would be just like a bigger 13" with a cooling solution for 100W APU instead of 30W APU. DONE
Less complexity, cheaper, easier to upgrade. Anyhow the CPU side on an intel CPU die is now maybe only 25% of the it.
Why not partnering directely with AMD to put a OVERCLOKED Z1 extreme or somekind of updated PS5 APU ?
I have somehow the feeling that this 16" laptop will not be competitive …exactely like the previous iteration of upgradable GPU boards from competitors.
The problem will be the price tag, FW will ask 1000€ to upgrade a 1800€ laptop… People will just buy a previous ASUS gamer model at 1000€.
Could be a good idea to fight in fact in the Steam Deck abd Asus Rog Ally !!! Directely ! Say “we do a machine that is 16” for gamers with the pad controller directely inside the chasis" for exemple ! Instead of the lsot space on the side of the keyboard you pur two gamepads You end up with a mega switsh for gamers… a real new product.
Maybe crazy , not so much it was already there when I was a kid :
I’d say it’s much too early to speculate about the future of a product that hasn’t even been specified yet.
Also I highly doubt that Framework customers will only want to upgrade the GPU. The Framework 16 will have highly modular input interfaces and allows upgrading/replacing whatever part you don’t like.
If the only advantage Framework would have would be the upgradable GPU then maybe yes, I could understand.
What we are getting is pretty much the same as a Z1 extreme at least from the specs they showed for that.
Edit: Yeah looks like the Z1 extreme is an even more power limited/optimized version of the 7840U so kind of a 7840UU so yeah we are getting exactly an overclocked z1 extreme XD
I agree with you of course. I am mostely talking of that this product has already existed and already failed…So its important for this young company to learn as much as possible from previous innovation.
My feeling may be completely wrong, but I don t see the difference between this machine and previousely failed machines.
I don t see a new market fite for this product…Or have not understand it.
I also think the gamers are completely different minded persons that the 13" laptop first targeted. Its a completely new market for FW, with big risks and opportunities.
Really the thing is 3 Years after…gamers want to change their GPU …they go on the market…and find out a complet PC Asus is almost the same as changing the GPU on FW…
EDIT: Looking at the demo on internet, is there a market for people wanting to create big adons to the back of the machine … Maybe? But I don t feel its going to be as big as gamers…its going to be 5% of the sales eventually…
People tinkering around with the hardware are great persons, all over this forum, I love you guys…I am one of those. But mainstream market don t want to open every day the laptop… even gamers
I don’t think so. Gamers don’t just throw away old components and buy new things if what they have is perfectly fine.
Yes, maybe the competition has cheaper GPU prices, but the Framework laptop still has NVME, display, RAM etc. that you would throw away with a lot of laptops because these things are soldered/glued together nowadays, especially on gaming laptops.
And all of the sudden the pricing on the Framework makes sense again.
Oh and by the way: If a customer already spends money on a gaming LAPTOP then surely he doesn’t mind paying a few extra bucks to get the better product.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a big beefy iGPU as much as the next guy (I actually think they are more interesting) and I even linked to a similar article but there is no way an APU can compete with discrete graphics. Given the small form factor, I’d guess at most ~30W TDP and that’s shared between GPU and CPU. I expect the GPU module alone to have double that. iGPU’s have gotten much better as of late and I was glad to hear the MX line was killed by nVidia because of it. That doesn’t mean that iGPU’s can or ever will kill discrete graphics as a whole.
iGPUs are inherently going to be limited by their memory interfaces, and part of the good performance on the Z1 is likely the soldered 6000MHz+ DDR5 its getting. A massive iGPU die wont matter if it still has to use slower DDR going through the CPU’s memory controller.
APUs arn’t new and while they’re great for some use cases and getting better with each revision I think pushing for a true dedicated GPU (even if it is some kind of mobile variant) is the best choice for Framework to really differentiate their product.
I think it’s valid to be concerned about market viability of the 16” product. I’ve got my own worries about how big and bold the latest slew of announcements was because of startup fear more generally, but I trust Framework’s steering (nrp is savvy enough to get in with Google), so we’ll see.
It’s important to note use case. Gaming is only one subset of the users of a 16”, and it’s really the only one that has an established market for APU-configuration devices in a consumer form factor. Data science wants the compute cores, engineering needs to run Fusion, and students need battery life. In terms of the vision as a whole for the 16, I think it’s a perfect compromise while still staying true to the company’s values and being very attractive to gamers.
