Well, the topic is clear, pre-order is out, the notebook is great, and AMD collaboration is flawless (energy efficient, AMD advantage, it is pretty amazing, almost as if someone chose the best possible). The only problem: 8gb of VRAM. We all know it. So, please, please, can anyone talk to AMD and ask for more? ;).
3 Likes
To be fair, we don’t even know how the 7700s performs. The only benchmark we have is a leak from the beginning of the year. Ive seen rumors putting it below a 3050 and on par with a 3070, minus ray, tracing of course.
I also personally can find almost no information on the technical specifics of the “AMD Advantage.” perhaps theres some method under this of more efficiently tapping the slower system ram to assist in padding the vram more effectively. Perhaps not.
Unfortunately, we just can’t know until the 7700s is released to some reputable benchmarkers paired with an amd chip.
2 Likes
Completely agree. Not only for games, which are quite likely to need more vram nowadays, but for AI too. As a dev, I can tell you, training models on 8gb is kinda hell. I hate AI as much as the next person but as long as I’m forced to build it I’d like it to be as convenient as possible.
Luckily there’s potential to increase it and get the newer, larger card at a later date, but people have said the same about a touch screen for years without that coming to fruition. Won’t stop me from getting it once I see other people get it in their hands and the kinks are worked out but I’d rather not lug around an external GPU anymore. Also, games are just going to keep asking for more VRAM as time goes on
AMD has not announced anything higher end than the Navi 33-based 7700S 8GB or 7600M XT 8 GB (they’re the same GPU). Doubling the VRAM on the Navi 33 would cannibalize AMD’s Pro laptop GPUs, if they ever release any.
I personally wish AMD can get their act together and release compelling GPU options based on the larger yet unreleased Navi 32, which will have a 256 bit bus, allowing for 16 GB of VRAM at the same density.
3 Likes
The 7700s is the exact same silicon and very similar memory config compared to the 7600m xt, or the desktop 7600. On top of that, framework claims that it can run at the max power limit of 100w. I’d say it’s pretty safe to assume it’s within 20-30% of the performance of the desktop 7600 which puts it pretty close to the gaming performance of a desktop 3060.
As for AI performance, it’s much harder to compare to nvidia because it is so software dependent, but I don’t expect this to be a very high performance option, and it your goal is to train large networks, it’s probably not a very good performer for the price. With that said, there might be an interesting argument for the iGPU for AI workloads. It can be configured with up to 96GB of available memory, even if it is half the compute performance, and lower bandwidth.
2 Likes
Also, in regards to 8gb vram for gaming, it is an unfortunate state of affairs… Navi 33 which the 7700s is based on only has a 128 bit memory bus. I’m pretty sure that makes it impractical to make a 16GB version of the card unless they do a clamshell design with memory chips on both sides of the board, though my knowledge on that could be outdated. AMD’s higher tier dies this gen are all chiplet based, and would support more memory more easily with wider busses, but they would come with other disadvantages, even if AMD decides to launch them. They are much less efficient than nvidias higher tier offerings like the 4080 laptop, or 4090 laptop.
I think at this point, the best hope would be for a 16GB card to be released later based on navi 32 later this year or next year, or for a 3rd party to make a nvidia module with either a 4080 or a 4090 in it, though I would imagine those would be extremely expensive, and I don’t know if the amd advantage program associated with the laptop would interfere in any way.
The next gen of cards is at least a year and a half out, if not 2 years, and laptop gpus usually lag behind the desktop launch by 3-6 months. Hopefully the gpu manufacturers make better decisions about the memory configurations on their lower end gpus next gen.
2 Likes
I know the AMD iGPU’s allow for it, but can you allocate cpu ram to the AMD dGPU’s as well?
The simple answer is not really. The RAM to CPU to GPU information pathway has a lot less bandwidth than native GPU VRAM and results in bad performance.
Yeah, it certainly isn’t the most performant option, but for some situations it might make sense… maybe just for inference where you just need to load a lot of parameters, but don’t need that much performance?
Well yes, I understand there’s a big difference between system ram and native vram. But with an nvidia gpu it’s not even possible to merge them as far as I’m aware. Even with the performance hit, it can be the difference between software running poorly, or not at all.
I don’t know your use case and I’m only familiar with games, but for games, a lack of VRAM usually results in either stuttering as the GPU pulls texture data from elsewhere or reduced texture quality even if you have the texture quality set to max.
For gaming I doubt there’d be any benefit. Maaaaybe a lil benefit if there’s a surplus of ram and the game isn’t configured to pre-load textures and such into ram before they’re needed so gpu can load from ram instead of the drive, but eh. I’m thinking more along the lines of AI work where eating up 24+GB of vram is ridiculously easy. AMD doesn’t have cuda support, but faking more vram could be an interesting advantage for quick development.
I am more worried about noise, no vapor chamber is strange.
What would be the benefit of a vapor chamber in this design? I thought they were mostly used to cover several components at once, but this design has separate heat pipes for the cpu die and gpu die by necessity. Is there still a performance benefit of a vapor chamber vs a heat pipe?
Well, vapor chamber is newer and sounds cool, so it must be better, right?!
2 Likes
Depends on the heat pipe thickness etc. Vapor chamber has a vastly higher conductance. However, I may be wrong in the ideal application of such as the framework 16 has the GPU separate and a vapor chamber may be overkill for an APU. Only just thought about it and it probably explains why it is not used.
1 Like
I did a bit of googling because I was curious, but couldn’t find any numbers for the amount of watts each solution can dissipate. All I found was some articles about how vapor chambers can conduct heat across their entire area efficiently while heat pipes only conduct along the axis of their wick efficiently.
I’m not an expert on this by any means, so I could be missing the key info here, but I would be curious to see how a vapor chamber might improve performance… Maybe future versions of the framework 16 mainboard could handle a sustained load higher than the currently quoted 45W with upgraded heat dissipation.
edit: I just realized I’m off topic for this thread… second time I’ve done that in as many days on this forum. I suppose vapor chambers could also be useful for cooling more ambitious memory subsystems on the gpu module though, so maybe I’m not too far off the mark lol.
I think as it does not have a discrete GPU, it simply does not need a vapor chamber. Maybe future revisions will be different like you said.
I have been looking as well and didn’t find a lot, but here at least some info from Dave2D, putting it at about a RTX 4060: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy5MWFrb0Y8&t=3s
However, unfortunately graphs in the video from Dave2D are not optimal, as they mention for example “1080p Ultra” for Far Cry 6, while we all know that Far Cry 6 would, if HD package is installed, send an error message to the brand new Framework 16 that VRAM is missing - so FPS numbers are a bit misleading if you want really good graphics ;).
Some general arguments for more VRAM: should be more sustainable as you can simply use GPUs with more VRAM longer, they are competitive for a longer time, even in a second life as a Framework EGPU. In addition, of course there is productivity - I heard Framework 16 is aiming to be a creator laptop as well. Not with 8gb of VRam - sorry.
4 Likes
It’s hard to justify purchasing a laptop, let alone something over $2000, that will struggle to not crash on modern games.