Every time Framework is brought up, there's a chorus of people saying they won't buy until they release an AMD edition, and as one of them this is great to see.
Edit: Also the input deck and the ability to attach an egpu as well as upgrade to a newer egpu in the future are huge. This is a fantastic leap forward for Framework.
There is always going to be a chorus about something. Power users are impossible to please because they all have strong opinions but not the same opinions.
People will still want different screen resolutions, aspect ratios, keyboard layouts, etc. Now that AMD is available people will want particular CPU SKUs. It will never end.
I wish Framework luck, because they are targeting the pickiest userbase that exists.
AMD 3:2 thin-and-light at a small overall screen size (but still usable) and with replaceable parts checks an enormous amount of power-user boxes. Getting off Intel was their last critical hurdle, and while for whatever reason it took them an eternity to listen to that (rather overwhelmingly loud) feedback, they finally did it.
I suspect the choruses will be much quieter now. If I hadn't already landed on a Beelink GTR6 mini-PC desktop + MNT Reform laptop, I'd be considering this finally - indeed, one of many reasons I went Reform over Framework originally was because Framework was married to Intel. And frankly, 3:2 still makes Framework tempting despite my lack of need for it.
I think USB4/TB3 was a huge box for the latest gen AMD mobile platform. Can't speak for others, but I'm generally docked with power over TB3 at home, and when I was in the office before. It's the one thing I wanted out of AMD that was missing for general use. Glad to see it here.
Definitely going Framework for my next laptop in a couple years... really tempted to get one sooner than later and pass down my M1 air to my daughter.
They’re targeting that user base in exactly the right way: give me options, get out of my way, and let me do it.
Too many platforms lock users into decisions they think are best for them, or worse, that they think are best for the company making said platform. It’s refreshing to be given not only options, but options I actually want.
I personally held off on getting one until my previous device (a Spectre x360) got smashed up in a car crash, but don't in any way regret this purchase even if I do still sort of miss touchscreens (and probably also would have waited for an AMD option otherwise).
But yeah, when I was suddenly in the market for a new laptop anyway, the extensive freedom to upgrade and configure this made it an extremely easy sell compared to anything else that would have been on my radar.
I’m one of the chorus. I actually preordered a TOTL Asus Zephyrus Duo about a month ago, and it came in last week. It’s been a dream so far — 16 real cores of AMD 7945HX, laptop 4090, hybrid graphics, two real screens! Main display is a quite color-accurate 16:10 miniled with 240hz freesync, lower display is a high-PPI IPS touch panel, dual raid-able M2 slots (I put in dual WD SN850Xs in raid0 and that’s showing ~14.5GB/s reads and ~13Gb/s writes in CrystalDiskMark), decent sound and webcam, keyboard is at the bottom edge…the only downsides are the touchpad size is a bit strange (portrait orientation) and the click on it doesn’t feel quite Macbook nice, no USB4, and the power brick is very brick-like, with a thick cable that doesn’t flex very well. Cooling is excellent due to the intake fans under the second screen combined with the lower heat output of the AMD chip, allowing it to run maxed out without throttling…they did this right. I can’t get Pop_OS to install yet, guessing it might need the AMD raid driver like Windows did, requires further investigation.
Anyway, excited for a Framework version too! While I prefer AMD integrated graphics to Intel, NVidia dGPU would be even better, and even better still if it was upgradable. Are laptop GPUs still available on MXM cards?
That is a pretty niche laptop, I think the Framework folks are going more for the every day driver kind of experience. I've got a Framework 13 and really like it, it is, for me, a pretty solid Thinkpad replacement. But the real icing on the cake will be when I update the motherboard for an upgrade. (since it is relatively new I don't expect that to happen until maybe next year).
On the Asus, are both screens touch screens? Or is only the lower screen a touch screen? I had looked at 20:2 type touch screens to do a sort of "media bar" setup on my desktop but didn't find anything at the time I could use. I'm wondering how well such a setup might work.
Why even try to use the hardware raid? I can't imagine it actually performs any better than mdraid, and with mdraid the drives are as portable as plain drives. You could destroy the special laptop and stick the drives into usb enclosures and access the array again on any other machine.
Tell me you work in ops with out saying you work in ops. :-)
Btw, this is excellent advice. Funny story, I have a FreeNAS device and the motherboard died and I thought "Oh my, I need to bring my ZFS volumes up on another machine, but I didn't have another machine with 6 SATA bays! I ended up having the drives all sitting out on the workbench connected a mainboard with 8 SATA ports so that I could create an archive of the data, and then got the mainboard fixed so I could re-assemble and re-use the FreeNAS but still it alerted me to the fact that I really needed a 6-8 drive cabinet if I wanted to do this again.
Heh, you were "lucky": I had a 4-drive NAS that died on me, and no motherboard lying around at all, let alone one with 4+ SATA ports.
I bought four cheap SATA-USB3 adapters, plugged them into two USB3 hubs, which I then plugged into the two USB3 ports of a Raspberry Pi 4, and arranged it all quite precariously in a small cardboard box that I cut holes into for airflow. Performance was terrible, of course, but it worked well enough until I could build a proper new NAS box.
The portability doesn't end with sata or usb ports.
With generic software raid (mdadm), even if you only had a single usb port and a single internal drive, you could image all the drives one at a time and then access the array of images on the single big drive. (not uncommon since usually time has passed by the time something fails)
It also goes the other way if you needed it to. Say a single array member was 4T but you only have a bunch of 1T drives, no problem, you can assemble 4 1T drives into a 4T container to hold the 4T image, and then use that image as an aray member itself.
Even if you don't have any loose external drives, you could even do it all via network shares with pieces residing on all of your other family members laptops and desktops, or every desk in an office, while they all still continue running windows and doing their normal jobs I mean.
Some of the possibilities are slow or fragile or both, so of course you don't set out to use 12 usb2.0 ports, but the point is essentially anything is possible, and you don't have to worry about predicting or planning for every possibility, you just don't have to care about how you'll recover the array in the future because it doesn't matter what form storage takes at that time, or what form you happen to have available. It would almost never make sense to do some things, but the point is that mdadm just doesn't care.
For a machine with only 2 or 4 internal drives where you want to use raid0 for max throughput, and don't want to rely on any special firmware support for booting raid0, just partition the drives so that /boot is a small raid1 across all the same drives, so that any of the drives could boot. Bonus, it automatically makes all the members of your main raid0 slightly smaller than the drive's nominal size, which means you can always fit them onto some other replacement drive later, even if the different manufacturers count bytes and formatting overhead differently.
I come from the days of sco unix on scsi hardware raid with full featured expensive cards and I do not miss it.
That's only until the machine in question is 5000km away and the soonest time you can get to it is in the three months.
Sure, for personal usage there is almost no usage for the HW RAID, but when you need to make sure what the system would always boot and it can't be serviced in hours/days - then you have almost no options for SW RAID.
No problem to put /boot on a raid1 on a small partition across all drives, so that any drive can boot, and no problem to even include a whole self-contained remotely accessible recovery os. It's a little bit more work to set up, but if you are professing a need for that, then a little extra setup is de rigueur. I remotely administered a ton of linux boxes in racks scattered across the US like that for years. Although I had out of band serial console access and could do full bare metal reinstall that way, I could also do it from any neighboring machine that was still running in the same rack if I had to, with a combination of network booting and/or booting from any one of the normal drives normal raid1 copies of the /boot partition.
Further remote-able fallback options that I never even had to use but could: Local hands just plucks a hot-swap drive from any of my other machines and pops it into the bad machine. All drives had the same bootable partition and all drives are redundant and so they could yank literally any one from the wall of server fronts. Or, better, local hands just plugs in a thumb drive and I take care of the rest. Thumb drive is already sitting there for that purpose, or they could make a new one from a download. But with 8 to 24 hot-swap drives per machine, meaning 8-24 copies of /boot, I never even once needed local hands to so much as plug in a thumb drive.
There is just no problem at all with sw raid. It only provides options, not remove them.
Did you even read my comment? It's quite clear what your environment was in the data-centers, with spares and remote hands.
Mine wasn't and then I say three months I don't kid or jest.
> No problem to put /boot on a raid1 on a small partition across all drives
This is exactly the problem. If the drive isn't totally dead (like it doesn't even respond to IDENT) then there is a chance what the BIOS/UEFI would try to boot from it and even succeed in that (ie would load the MBR/boot app) and then there is no way to alter the boot process at this point. HW RAID card provides a single boot point and handle the failing drives by itself, never exposing those shenanigans to the upper level.
Like sure, you are happy with your setup, you never had a bad experience with it, you always had OOB management and remote hands - but it doesn't means what it a silver bullet working 100% of times for everyone.
Yes, I've seen systems with SW/fake RAID failed to boot because the boot process failed after selecting a half-dead drive as a boot device, with my own eyes. Thankfully I was geographically close to them, not 5000km away.
Yes, I serviced and prepared systems for the 5000km away divisions and they are really serviced only a couple of months in a year, all other time you need an extremely urgent reasons why do you need to a rent a heavy 'copter to go there. No, there is no remote-hands there. The maximum point of IT-competency there is raking bills with satellite Internet.
+1.
Years ago I had a Raid1 mirror that failed because the controller itself went bonkers, and both drives were accumulating errors. Luckily I was using mdraid and could recover their files by using testdisk [0] on both of them separately as USB drives on a different Linux machine. Was a really really long process; I pray the storage divinities not to have to live those couple days again.
Good call. I have manually repaired a few mdadm arrays in my time that would have surely been complete losses in the hardware RAID systems I've encountered.
I wrote this a while back comparing Intel 12th Gen to AMD 6000, and power/perf should apply even more to the 13th Gen vs 7040 (Zen4 + RDNA3):
The reason that people want AMD CPUs is simple - they’re much better than what Intel is offering. We can see empirically how wide this gap is now since we have independent reviews of identical laptop platforms from Lenovo and HP’s ultrathin business laptops (the same segment as Framework):
HP EliteBook 840 G9 1280P vs HP EliteBook 845 G9 6950HS [1] - these are both respective flagship parts, and we can see the AMD version has both a +23% performance rating and a +23% better battery runtime. Note, that on the HP website currently, the same configuration AMD version is also >30% cheaper.
Lenovo ThinkPad T14s G3 6850U vs 1235U [2] - since the Intel version reviewed isn’t a top of the line model, it’s not fair to compare performance numbers, but even with the significantly lower TDP Intel part (15W vs 28W), the AMD version of the laptop ends up with an even bigger lead with a 35% better battery runtime. The AMD version is also 10% cheaper than their Intel counterparts from the Lenovo site pricing.
In both these cases, the AMD version wins significantly on processing power, battery efficiency and price. The 7040 should extend the lead on the latter, and that's not taking GPU performance into account [3], where the AMD Radeon 680M simply crushes the Intel Xe 96EU by an average of +88% in game performance, and +135% in synthetics (and again, the 7040’s RDNA3 GPU and Xilinx AI core will extend the lead even more for the upcoming generation).
Well, I have USB3 problems with all my AMD machines which makes e.g. attaching a VR headset reliably difficult. Random quickly repeated disconnects of devices due to a buggy chip from ASMedia/ASUS that AMD uses everywhere. I like TDP of the current gen though AMD turned to an even worse company than Intel in how it treats Threadripper users. DisplayPort over USB-C might not work either.
While having hardware compatibility issues suck, I'm not sure what your problems have to do with AMD's mobile APUs, which have their USB2/3/4 controllers implemented on-die (block diagram: https://cdn.videocardz.com/1/2021/12/AMD-Rembrandt-Diagram.j...) not using an external controller.
USB features depend ultimately on the laptop manufacturers' implementation (eg neither the HP or Lenovo models linked implement USB4 but they are in other models like the Lenovo Z13), but I haven't seen any that claim to have DP-alt support not be able to support it. As the Framework will have USB4 (and DP-alt and PCIe encapsulation are mandated by Microsoft for Windows 11 compatibility), I don't think that's a real worry for anyone.
Glad to hear that! My 8-core AMD laptop from ASUS with 3080 is almost 2 years old now so things might have changed. My Threadripper still has USB issues and I don't like e.g. inability to type text or move mouse for 10-20 seconds just because the USB controller on the most expensive Threadripper board decides to have a game of disconnects.
Again, I agree that hardware compatibility issues suck... Personally, I think life's too short to live with glitches like that - ASMedia chips are used in a lot of PCIe USB cards these days as well, but I've had good luck w/ Renasas cards in the recent past (when I was running VFIO). These USB cards are all pretty cheap ($20-40), so I'd order a few to try and keep the one that works the best.
AMD have been thrashing Intel in performance, thermals and battery life for several years now. Intel are also a rather unpleasant company, I'll happily go with a competitor whenever it makes sense.
When Ryzen first came out, Intel still used the number of cores to differentiate their consumer and enterprise lines, which meant you could get a bucketload of cores from AMD without paying "enterprise" prices.
AMD still tends to have lower actual TDP than Intel, which is more efficient in a laptop and easier to cool in a desktop.
If you're going to use the integrated GPU, RDNA generally performs better in games.
I have linux a notebook with the AMD Ryzen 7 5700u and a Mat screen. Its pretty great on battery (6+ hrs). Even the built in gpu is good enough for general use. I think these newer AMD cpus are even better and worth the wait.
My home linux machine is a ninth gen intel with Nvidia. Its technically a notebook, but more like a portable workstation. Its powerful, but battery life is terrible (<3) and you can hear the fans. It can game quite well however.
On Linux AMD drivers are by far some of the best, and the driver support is miles better both on the end of the 1st party support as well as 3rd party software support.
There's a few instances where AMD GPU drivers even outshine their windows counterparts like in OpenGL performance. Intel's driver support is great as well, but their performance recently has not matched AMD, and their iGPUs don't compare to AMD's iGPUs.
Also for beefier laptops with discreet GPUs, intel up until very recently would need an NVIDIA card to get decent performance which would require NVIDIA drivers, which are notorious for complicating things on Linux. On the other hand AMD laptops with discreet AMD gpus already have their drivers built into the kernel which removes almost any potential complication.
Also there's personal preference, which in my case leans toward AMD because of their generally more open stance with their new technology, like raytracing and FSR which is contrasted by NVIDIAs typically closed off approach to the same things. Intel isn't as bad as NVIDIA in this department either but this is just personal opinion.
Lastly AMD CPUs are generally cheaper than intel, and in the last few generations performed better overall than intel.
TL:DR AMD on linux has great drivers with good support, the synergy between AMD's CPUs and GPUs and their combined APUs are very good, and personally I appreciate AMD's more open approach to technology like FSR, even if they aren't anywhere near perfect.
Really exciting to see. I almost got a Framework for my work setup last month, but lack of an AMD option held me back. My personal laptop is still chugging along, but the AMD Framework is at the top of my list now!
If only I'd waited an extra month to order my new work equipment.
Yeah the possibilities are exciting to say the least, the ability to specialize your laptop into an AI processing powerhouse on the fly could be very valuable.
I for one was waiting for a touch screen option as well, but this sounds easier than the AMD part sounded awhile ago. And they will probably add it as an option at some point, their track record for listening to what their users are saying in their forums is awesome so far.
Edit: Also the input deck and the ability to attach an egpu as well as upgrade to a newer egpu in the future are huge. This is a fantastic leap forward for Framework.