I would love to buy an ARM Laptop, but currently there is nothing I’m willing to buy.
So I thought about building a Rockchip Carrier-Mainboard for the Framework Laptop.
Since the RK3588 came out as a SOM, I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to build one.
There would be no USB4/Thunderbolt, as the PCIE connectivity of the SOM is pretty limited. But it would be enough to connect a m.2 Gen 3x2 SSD, wifi6 and 4 usb ports.
But it will make a great little efficient ARM Laptop, possible fitting other SOMs.
I have experience to some extend in Altium Designer, but not with SOMs, SOC or similar.
@Jason_Hilton One way to solve this would be to avoid HDMI
There are DSI to eDP ICs on the market. Retail IC price seems to be close to $20 though.
Add a PCIe switch for nvme and usb3 and those would be set, too.
The next hard part would be USB-C. You would need to find a way to mux HDMI, PCIe, Power & USB3 to the ports. Not sure what ICs to look at for that… Especially only 2 HDMI outs could be problematic. 4 port USB3 shouldn’t be an issue, and there are 5 port PCIe switches, so 4 + nvme would work…
The boot process/software side on the CM4 would be easier for sure. And the community is way larger.
There are also other compute modules, radxa cm3 and one from banana pi.
DSI to eDP seems like a good way too.
I think PCIE/USB 4 is not necessary and will complicate all of this quite significantly. Display over USB-C would be nice tho.
I’m not sure it would be. rpi doesn’t do uefi booting, it has a custom boot loader, the framework motherboard is uefi. I’m not sure if that has implications for any of the other boards in the computer that may expect a uefi boot/initialisation sequence.
WHaou great. I have been following pine64 s efforts.
And what they say is that it will take some 2 years before all the features are working (similar to RK3399 and cousins). It seems a good time to start developement as the board is dropping in price, preview models were in the range of +300 USD. It will slowely go down to rk 3399 prices at 80 USD.
It looks quite challenging, but it is a SoC quite opensource, so it should be fine.
Now I am more interested in future developments of Risc V, which will take even longer to come up maybe 5 years to have same features (GPU…).
I personally don t feel like getting an ARM laptop that is somehow as open as intel… and cannot run softwares like games with steam (linux). Bottom line I will always be setback by running games, even if I am not often running them!
Yeah the SoQuartz looks pretty good. But also it is a lot slower than a RK3588.
And only has a pcie 2.0 x1 connection… https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/SOQuartz
Sorry to respond to a dead thread, but this seems like the right place. I just saw a video about the open source anyon_e laptop. It uses an RK3588 with an OLED screen and it’s 13 inch and uses the Framework hinges.
The video:
If this could be done, I feel like making a mainboard for the framework laptop would be easier since you wouldnt have to engineer most of the rest of the laptop.
Well, the screen swap would require making the OLED fit in the Framework laptop and maybe some firmware or something? I’m pretty sure the regular screen and the OLED are both eDP.
Problem is there are no oleds in the right size, also most laptop oleds do have non standard pinouts and power requirements which would (and will once a suitable display shows up) require additional adabting.
