Framework Laptop 16 won a Computex 2024 Best Choice Awards: Sustainable Tech Special Award
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Sean Holister at The Verge published an update reviewing 1 month use of a newer batch.
He reports several issues fixed or worked around, but he also noticed heat and noise, and failing to suspend while the 7700S discrete GPU was in use. (He reported an incident where his wife noticed the noise and initially thought he was vacuuming the living room — I wonder if in that instance it was on his lap and the bottom vents were partially blocked.)
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RTINGS.com reviewed the Framework Laptop 16 in June.
Framework Laptop 16 (2023) Review - RTINGS.com
(via Framework Laptop 16 User Reviews - #438 by TheStachelfisch)
(I didn’t understand this statement in the RAM section.
Each SO-DIMM of DDR5 RAM has two channels; therefore, if you plan on upgrading to more RAM down the road, you can select an option with only one DIMM and add another one later without having to worry about sacrificing performance like with the older DDR4 standard.
A DDR4 SO-DIMM has 1 channel with 64 data lines. A DDR5 SO-DIMM has two channels, each with 32 data lines.
Confusingly, AMD’s Ryzen 7840HS specifications say the processor has two memory channels. I hope they mean it supports two SO-DIMMS.
[The RTINGS statement might be true if two SO-DIMMs shared only two 32 bit data channels to the processor. But that is only 64 data lines total, and since DDR5 is only 50% higher frequency, that would mean that the DDR5 with two SO-DIMMS would be lower bandwidth than DDR4 with two SO-DIMMS, and that seems unlikely.]
So it doesn’t seem like a single DDR5 SO-DIMM can provide the bandwidth of two DDR5 SO-DIMMS, and therefore it will have less performance.)
The terminology is commonly used horribly.
On DDR1, DDR2, DDR3, and DDR4 one channel was 64-bits.
DDR5 cuts the size of each channel in half to 32-bits but doubles the number of channels to 2 channels per module (and 4 channels total on consumer grade CPUs). However most people (including often AMD) still use the term “channel” to refer to 64 bits.
The CPU and the laptop both support two 64-bit modules on a total 128-bit bus. That is what both RTINGS and AMD are trying to say.
I have no clue how things are gonna change with DDR6 moving to 48-bit channels (and expected to stick with 4 channels on consumer grade CPUs, bringing it to a total of 192-bits).