The Framework Laptop could step up significantly if there was a version which supported ECC RAM and could swap parts with a Mini-PC. What ambitious geek wouldn’t love a Laptop totally compatible with a low-power home server which could both safely support advanced filesystems like ZFS, host VMs, etc. It would cover all my computing needs perfectly!
ECC ram would be nice however until support for that becomes available on consumer chips, it’s going to raise the cost of an already expensive laptop to even more expensive, shrinking the market for it even further. i.e. not only are you going to be paying more for the processor but also for the ram itself.
If they did do that, however, it would be nice if they also added two more ram slots to allow a total of 192GB of RAM to compete with the top end workstations from Dell, HP, and Lenovo.
I would love to be able to have a home server that is as low power as my AMD FW13! Currently my home server is running an old broadwell xenon from 2015 and the entire server without HDDs consumes ~50 watts at the wall. According to powertop, my laptop idles around 5-6 watts. Naturally thats not including the AC/DC conversion losses but if anyone could release a board that sips power like my laptop while still supporting ECC ram like my xenon then I’d buy it in a heartbeat.
Similarly, ECC ram is one of the few things that would entice me to replace my AMD FW13.
You can get those.
The ecc bit is a bit harder to come by but your main issue with mobile chips for server applications is the rather limited ammount of pcie lanes available.
The term “server” can mean a lot of things. My need in a Home Server is primarily as a reliable always-on hub for storage (ZFS Filesystem and PostgreSQL databases) and essential computation. Two large mirrored disks would suffice though more would be better. I’ve tried this repeatedly with BSD and Linux running on small PCs and after a few years the data always gets corrupted. ECC is essential to my use case, even with remote backups.
Indeed, that is the hurdle because if it doesn’t have ECC then it isn’t up for consideration at all for any of my servers.
For the love of computers that don’t crash!
-Please give us an option for ECC RAM…