Hear me out but I think FW should skip Raptor Lake is they haven’t already designed the board. Raptor Lake will bring few improvements over Alder Lake and Meteor Lake isn’t supposed to be far behind Raptor Lake, I suspect it will be similar to the 7th and 8th gen transition. Meteor Lake should bring greater improvements to both CPU and GPU than Raptor Lake and with the delay between announcement and launch of FW models, I’d like to not see FW get behind if the gap between Gens really is that short.
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…Not unpopular.
I much rather Framework improve the already released products’ BIOS / firmware / EC / stability / behaviour / hinge / TB4 certification / DP, HDMI and USB-A expansion cards…etc before developing more products…
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If even; there is data to suggest that anything but the highest performance models in 13th gen will still be based on 12th gen architecture… I agree, 13th gen intel does not provide any meaningful benefits over 12th and atop that I hope for an AMD board to be developed after framework is done playing catchup with Chromebook orders and the current batches of 12th gen.
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If I am not wrong for desktop SKUs, anything below the 13600k are 12th gen chips. Not sure how it translates to Mobile ones.
I am interested in Meteor Lake too and hopefully an improved Iris XE, or even Intel ARC Battlemage mobile GPU (I’m trying to get an Intel A770 but let’s see how).
In the meantime, hopefully we can get more optimisations like how Dell and OEMs have been doing in their mainboard BIOS and fixes like Second Coming said.
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I disagree. Until now I was waiting for a framework with an AMD cpu for better battery life. Raptor lake might have few new design changes, but the number of low power cores is increased a lot. In theory this could boost power efficiency and improve battery life. IMO the not so great battery life was the deal breaker for buying a framework laptop and the main reason to ask for an AMD version. Lets hope Raptor lake indeed will be much more power efficient.
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@Someone2 Those cores don’t massively reduce power draw, they increase it. More cores = more power without efficiency gains. Raptor Lake is Alder Lake but with small revisions, you won’t expect better battery life, in fact it will be worse. The core architecture for the e-cores is still the same. Alder Lake was already a regression from Tiger Lake on battery life and it will only get worse. Meteor Lake will be on a new node with a new architecture for both P and E-cores and a revamped iGPU. Improvements across the board.
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Looks like you are right. What a let down. I hoped the extra low power cores ment the power cores could be used less (only for intens tasks like gaming), saving energy.
But it looks like indeed they are used simultaniously to get a bit more performance with an even higher power draw. I still have some hope that with right power settings we could get better battery life.
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I agree. Anyhow it doesn t feel that it s inline with FW cycle releasing a new board every year… 12th gen shipped August 22. Next release is August 2023 with 14th gen.
I d like to see
- improvement in power usage of 12th gen CPU via BIOS and expension cards
- a 15" screen version.
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Considering Meteor Lake desktop is having issues (MLID) and mobile is fine, and Meteor Lake is slated for 2H 2023, not sure if we can wait awhile more and get an huge upgrade in both the CPU and iGPU (which supposedly uses Arc GPU tile instead of the old Iris Xe), won’t be good for gaming but I feel it would help with productivity workloads.
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That’s only 6 months away. If FW were releasing in May like they did for Alder Lake then Raptor Lake would be kinda pointless.
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Supposedly announcement in 2H 2023 and we see the CPUs in Q3 2023. So if Framework is working on Raptor Lake, I am not sure if it is worth it, despite just the IPC increase and more cores.
Probably Meteor Lake would supposedly bring a larger improvement in IPC vs Raptor Lake plus more powerful iGPU based on Intel ARC. So probably better to work on that I guess.
That being said, a biannual mainboard release might be good too. 2 generations for each upgrade and 1 year break between for optimisations and patches.
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I think for Framework it all comes down to supply chain. If they can get the parts, it is getting made. The whether it is worth it from a performance aspect probably does not even ente rthe picture. Even if the improvement is marginal someone offers you a 12th gen or a 13th gen as brand new offering at a similar price, which one are you buying? Probably the newer one (maybe not if you use linux sometimes it pays to be behind a bit 
). If they fit into their manufacturing cycle that is what they go with. Now if 14th is available without blowing their production schedule then maybe they do skip a generation, but really I strongly doubt the “worth” of the improvements is even on the radar for Framework.
As to more cores = more power draw, yes it does, but it also = faster time to idle. In my experience with laptops over the years trying to squeeze power savings the most efficient thing you can ever do is disable turbo on battery and let all of the cores hit that task. Limiting cores on battery actually makes the battery life worse, and when you talk about power draw while plugged in…well I know I generally don’t care. If power was expensive where I live, I might, but I have all of my home lab power needs built in to my power budget as is, so it is assigned regardless, and a couple of extra watts is not going to kill that budget.
That all being said I am going to stick to a 3 year upgrade cycle with the Framework motherboards, so my next upgrade should be for the 15th gen or possibly a thunderbolt compatible AMD board if it happened to come along before then…which I highly doubt unless AMD improves its small vendor support.
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Speaking in terms of bussines, they should release a 13th gen edition to keep up with demand(some will not buy it because not 13th gen). And because not launching anything in 2 years is a lot worse than launching a small upgrade
How about a Framework RISC-V laptop? Now THAT would be a game changer. Killer battery life and they can use really well tuned chips. Hell, they could even have a custom chip of their own.
I don’t think RISC V is really there in terms of performance, performance per watt, node, integrated graphics, and OS support…
@Ian_Comings @Shiroudan I like RISC-V and I want to see a board developed for the FW laptop. For basic tasks like web browsing I expect it to be alright assuming decent software support. Literally anything else would be poor I expect. Certainly you would lose Thunderbolt capabilities which would negate a lot.
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Agree with skipping Raptor Lake entirely, especially with what Intel revealed at CES…
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Well, coming back to this…this aged poorly 
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I still stand that I am more interested in Meteor Lake than Raptor Lake 
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@GhostLegion Yeah… I wasn’t too surprised that they announced it, but at least we still got an AMD Board and a dGPU laptop after that…
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