The Framework modularity is fantastic, but is now hindered by the slower Thunderbolt 4 spec. 40gbps is not enough for modern HDMI 2.1 or 2.2, eGPUs, OCuLink, etc.
Is there plans to upgrade this to Thunderbolt 5 on future laptops?
Feels long overdue, especially considering people like me want to replace modern Macs with a Linux-first laptop. Macbooks have had it for almost 2 years.
Unfortunatelly, as far as I understand, this is completly out of framework’s control and instead reliant on AMD/Intel, whos latest mobile chips do not support higher than thunderbolt 4 connectivity and have very little amount of available PCIe lanes on mobile chips for framework to use for an external TB5 controller.
I see a number of TB5 laptops, so Framework could implement this if they wanted, but yes, I understand it might seem better for them to wait for Intel to integrate. I wasn’t aware of that issue, very strange considering Intel develops and pushes TB5! Maybe framework should switch to Oculink instead!
With oculing you hit the wall with user usability, because of inability to hot plug it and many others. And in the end you are still limited by the PCIe lanes available from your CPU, which for mobile chips is usually only 16. (This might be wrong) on gen 4 PCIe you need 8 lanes to hit the spec speed for TB5, but you also need 4 lanes for an SSD and in case with FW16 8 more lanes for the dGPU, so in the end you have very little wiggle room to add anything but the most nessesary components.
So it is def possible to have TB5 on FW13 Pro, but it comes with a lot of downsides compared to Apple with their control over silicon.
I am personally hoping the next generation of amd and intels mobile chips will have on board usb4 80Gbit/tb5 which should then cause it to be used a lot more. Thunderbolt itself was ultra niche before intel and later amd started integrating it into their chips and giving it to the laptop manufacturers for close to free.
They could have put a dedicated tb5 controller in the new intel boards but that would have meant that 1 or 2 ports would be different and it would also mean much higher idle power if something was plugged into one of these ports as the dedicated tb5 chipsets that are currently available use a lot more than 0 power for just existing so since they went for absolute max idle power here I can see why they didn’t. Also the tb5 controllers currently available are expensive.
Still it sucks that they keep just leaving 8 pcie lanes on the table completely unused in the 13, would be neat if the at least exposed them on some fpc connector or something so people could use them in custom builds but it would make the pcb more complex and probably marginally more expensive.
Hmmm… Thunderbolt 4 is only supported on Intel chips from Framework, correct? So AMD laptops operate at USB4 (min 20Gbps) or slower? Annoying that isn’t specified on the product page.
Honestly I could care less about the expansion cards if they can’t support anything modern like HDMI 2.1, Oculink, TB5, etc. Is there another manufacturer that is really trying to offer a Macbook-quality product for Linux?
(or do I have to wait several years for Asahi?)
Certified tb yeah but tb4 devices do work with the amd frameworks (at full 40Gbit) just less certifiedly.
I wouldn’t say it’s macbook quality (not a hidpi display, not milled aluminum etc.), but there’s a new System76 build with Oculink… I was surprised to see it included: Pangolin Pro
I just saw this new NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 5070 graphics Module.
The card itself seems to support HDMI 2.1b (plus 3× DisplayPort 2.1a on many models) – but the module itself doesn’t have an HDMI port or even a DisplayPort – so users are stuck with the ancient HDMI 2.0b expansion card – is that correct? Is it really not possible for them to have just exposed the advanced HDMI capabilities of the card?
Thanks for sharing! I have a Lemur Pro from System76 now – it’s pretty underwhelming in terms of build quality (especially compared to a Macbook!).
I see this new Pangolin has HDMI 2.1 which is already a big step forward and the choice to include an OCuLink port is great for future-proofing.
Just learned there is an Oculink module “Dev Kit” from Framework too!
for what it’s worth, the NVIDIA and AMD graphics modules both have a USB-C displayport alt mode connection. you could connect an external monitor via that port, rely on another displayport USB-C expansion card, get a displayport expansion card, or use an hdmi 2.0b card like you’d already mentioned.