Framework releasing a Mac Mini was certainly not on bingo card for this year.
Framework’s first desktop is a strange—but unique—mini ITX gaming PC
Submitted 2 months ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
KoalaUnknown@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Pizza@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
I wasn’t prepared. I’ve been eyeing a mini for a while and this thing kills it on value compared to what I would get in a similar price point.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Lmao the news about this desktop is strangling their website to the point of needing a 45 minute waiting list
SatyrSack@feddit.org 2 months ago
They did announce three major products today.
Liz@midwest.social 2 months ago
Yeah that touchscreen tablet convertible machine is what has me psyched. I’m not the target for it, and already own a 16, but I could see that thing selling well. I honestly think they came out with the desktop because they just kinda felt they needed a desktop.
Pizza@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
Guilty. This thing came out at the perfect time and I was considering building my own or a Mac mini but this has 95% of what I’m looking for for less than a spec compromised Mac mini. So I preordered. And I kept hitting refresh lol.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Holy moly this is awesome! I am in for the 128GB SKU.
I know people are going to whine about non upgradable memory, but you can just replace the board, and in this case it’s so worth it for the speed/power efficiency.
My only ask would be a full X16 (or at least a physical X16) PCIe slot or breakout ribbon.
slacktoid@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
I understand the memory constraints but it does feel weird for framework, is all I have to say. But that’s also the general trajectory of computing from what it seems. I really want lpcamm to catch on!
Scholars_Mate@lemmy.world [bot] 2 months ago
Apparently Framework did try to get AMD to use LPCAMM, but it just didn’t work from a signal integrity standpoint at the kind of speeds they need to run the memory at.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Eventually most system RAM will have to be packaged anyway. Physics dictate you pay a penalty having it go over pins and mobo traces, and it gets more severe with every advancement.
It’s possible that external RAM will eventually evolve into a “2nd tier” of system memory, for background processes, spillover, inactive programs/data, things like that).
alleycat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What’s a SKU? Google just says “Stock Keeping Unit”, but I don’t think that’s correct in this context.
officermike@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s correct. A product with various options will have each combination of options under a different SKU. It’s a singular number that identifies an exact version of a product.
chaospatterns@lemmy.world 2 months ago
In this context, SKU refers to a variant of this product
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
its used to mean a new product that you specifically have to keep track of. e. g if you found framework desktops in a store, it wouldnt all be sold under 1 sku. all 3 ram capacities would be 3 different bar codes
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
As others said.
In this context it would be one of the CPU/Memory combinations framework offers: en.wikipedia.org/…/List_of_AMD_Ryzen_processors#S…
Ulrich@feddit.org 2 months ago
but you can just replace the board
The board is like, the whole computer tho. The mobo, CPU, GPU and RAM are all the same component. It’s everything Framework is supposed to oppose. That took them what, 4 years? to throw away their values?
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They also announced three other products (one new, two refreshes) which are still being actively developed and are fully-modular devices at low cost. If they’re “throwing away their values,” they’re not doing it very well.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Not really sure who this is for. With soldered RAM is less upgradeable than a regular PC.
AI nerds maybe? Sure got a lot of RAM in there potentially attached to a GPU.
But how capable is that really when compared to a 5090 or similar?
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The 5090 is basically useless for AI dev/testing because it only has 32GB. Mind as well get an array of 3090s.
The AI Max is slower and finicky, but it will run things you’d normally need an A100 the price of a car to run.
KingRandomGuy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Useless is a strong term. I do a fair amount of research on a single 4090. Lots of problems can fit in <32 GB of VRAM. Even my 3060 is good enough to run small scale tests locally.
I’m in CV, and even with enterprise grade hardware, most folks I know are limited to 48GB (A40 and L40S, substantially cheaper and more accessible than A100/H100/H200). My advisor would always say that you should really try to set up a problem where you can iterate in a few days worth of time on a single GPU, and lots of problems are still approachable that way. Of course you’re not going to make the next SOTA VLM on a 5090, but not every problem is that big.
felixwhynot@lemmy.world 2 months ago
… but only OpenCL workloads, right?
warmaster@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This is one stupid product. It really goes against everything the framework brand has identified with.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’d argue not. It’s as modular/repairable as the platform can be (with them outright stating the problematic soldered RAM), not exorbitantly priced for what it is, and what I think is most “Framework,” is shooting for a niche big OEMs have completely flubbed or enshittified.
Ulrich@feddit.org 2 months ago
It’s as modular/repairable as the platform can be
It can’t be. That’s the point.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Desktops are already that, though. In order for them to distinguish themselves in the industry, they can’t just offer another modular desktop PC. They can’t offer prebuilts, or gaming towers, or small form factor units, or pre-specced you-build kits. They can’t even offer low-cost micro-desktops. All of those markets are saturated.
But they can offer a cheap Mac Studio alternative. Nobody’s cracked that nut yet. And it remains to be seen if this will be it, but it certainly seems like it’s lined up to.
ganoo_slash_linux@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I feel like this is a big miss by framework. Maybe I just don’t understand because I already own a Velka 3 that i used happily for years and building small form factor with standard parts seems better than what this is offering. Better as in better performance, aesthetics, space optimization, upgradeability - SFF is not a cheap or easy way to build a computer.
The biggest constraint building in the sub-5 liter format is GPU compatibility because not many manufacturers even make boards in the <180mm length category. Also can’t go much higher than 150-200 watts because cooling is so difficult. There are still options though, i rocked a PNY 1660 super for a long time, and the current most powerful option is a 4060ti. Although upgrades are limited to what manufacturers occasionally produce, it is upgradeable, and it is truly desktop performance.
On the CPU side, you can physically put in whatever CPU you want. The only limitation is that the cooler, alpenfohn black ridge or noctua l9a/l9i, probably won’t have a good time cooling 100+ watts without aggressive undervolting and power limits. 65 watts TDP still gives you a ryzen 7 9700x.
Motherboards have the SFF tax but are high quality in general. Flex ATX PSUs were a bit harder to find 5 or 6 years ago but now the black 600W enhance ENP is readily available from Velkase’s website. Drives and memory are completely standard. m.2 fits with the motherboard, 2.5in SATA also fits in one of the corners. Normal low profile DDR5 is replaceable / upgradeable.
What framework is releasing is more like a laptop board in a ~4 liter case and I really don’t like that in order to upgrade any part of CPU, GPU or memory you have to replace the entire board because it’s soldered on APU and not socketed or discrete components. Framework’s enclosure hasn’t been designed to hold a motherboard+discrete GPU and the board doesn’t have a PCIe slot if you wanted to attach a card via riser in another case. It could be worse but I don’t see this as a good use of development resources.
Acters@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think the biggest limiting factor for your mini PC will always be the VRAM and any workload that enjoys that fast RAM speed. Really, I think this mini PC from framework is only sensible for certain workloads. It was poised as a mobile chip and certainly is majorly power efficient. On the other hand I don’t think it is for large scaling but more for testing at home or working at home on the cheap. It isn’t something I expected from framework though as I expected them to maintain modularity and the only modularity here is the little USB cards and the 3D printed front panel designs lol
excral@feddit.org 2 months ago
I don’t get the point. Framework laptops are interesting because they are modular but for desktop PCs that’s the default. And Framework’s PCs are less modular than a standard PC because the RAM is soldered
benjaminb@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
That makes no sense - that’s more like Apple then…
I don’t know if it’s the case, but modular IO on PC maybe nice.
4shtonButcher@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Now, can we have a cool European company doing similar stuff? At the rate it’s going I can’t decide whether I shouldn’t buy American because I don’t want to support a fascist country or because I’m afraid the country might crumble so badly that I can’t count on getting service for my device.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
So… now Framework Corp is selling non-upgradable hardware?
I dunno. Conceptually I want to like Framework. But their pricing means it is basically never worth buying and upgrading versus just buying a new laptop (seriously, run the numbers. You basically save 10 bucks over two generations of shopping at Best Buy). But they also have a system that heavily encourages people to horde spare parts rather than just take it to an e-waste disposal facility/bin.
avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
You get fast memory as a result. If you don’t care about the fast memory, there’s no good reason to buy this, with their motherboard. There’s a use case this serves which can’t be served by traditional slotted memory and the alternative is to buy 4-5 NVIDIA 3090/4090/5090. If you want that use case, then this is a pretty good deal.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
And your phone isn’t repairable because it needs to be water proof. Your earbuds because of power efficiency. Etc.
Also, I suggest watching this www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3zB9EFntmA.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It will be faster than most next-gen laptops, and it’s much cheaper than a similarly-specced Asus Z13. Strix Halo uses a quad channel bus and, 2 full Ryzen CCDs, and a 40 CU GPU. Its more than twice the size/performance of two true “laptop chips” put together.
Everything except the APU/RAM/Mobo combo is upgradable, and you don’t have to replace the whole machine if the board fails.
I mean, if you don’t need that kind of compute/RAM, this system is not for you, and old gaming desktops are probably better deals for pure gaming. But this thing 100% has a niche.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Everything except the APU/RAM/Mobo combo is upgradable, and you don’t have to replace the whole machine if the board fails.
So… storage, case, and USB C dongles?
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think the framework desktop would be an absolute powerhouse as a workstation desktops.
Think developers ( that still use desktops ), people who do raw computational power for science, servers, ai development, …
DacoTaco@lemmy.world 2 months ago
No, the pc is upgradable. They explicitly said in the event that the desktop was suppose to be an actual desktop with replaceable parts as much as technically possible
Mihies@programming.dev 2 months ago
At least memory is soldered on because of high throughout they say.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 months ago
their pricing means it is basically never worth buying and upgrading versus just buying a new laptop (seriously, run the numbers. You basically save 10 bucks over two generations of shopping at Best Buy).
Maybe so. But the big difference is, you can upgrade iteratively rather than taking the entire hit of a new device all at once. So I can buy all of the individual components of my next laptop a few hundred dollars at a time over the course of a couple of years, and use them as I get them. By the time I’ve ship-of-theseus’d the whole device, I may have spent the same amount of money on that new computer, but I paced it how I wanted it. Then I put all of the old components into an enclosure and now I can use it as a media center or whatever. Plus, if something breaks, I can fix it.
ObsidianZed@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Much like their laptops, I’m all for the idea, but what makes this desirable by those of us with no interest in AI?
I’m out of that loop though I get that AI is typically graphics processing heavy, can this be taken advantage of with other things like video rendering?
I just don’t know exactly what an AI CPU such as the Ryzen AI Max offers over a non-AI equivalent processor.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
There is a massive push right now for energy efficient alternatives to nvidia GPUs for AI/ML. PLENTY of companies are dumping massive amounts of money on macs and rapidly learning the lesson the rest of us learned decades ago in terms of power and performance.
The reality is that this is going to be marketed for AI because it has an APU which, keeping it simple, is a CPU+GPU. And plenty of companies are going to rush to buy them for that and a very limited subset will have a good experience because they don’t have time sensitive operations.
But yeah, this is very much geared for light-moderate gaming, video rendering, and HTPCs. That is what APUs are actually good for.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 2 months ago
For modularity: There’s also modular front I/O using the existing USB-C cards, and everything they installed uses standard connectors.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
There’s lots of workstation niches that are gated by VRAM size, like very complex rendering, scientific workloads, image/video processing… It’s not mega fast, but basically this can do things at a reasonable speed that you’d normally need a $20K+ computer for.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Much like their laptops
Its nothing like their laptops, thats the issue :/ Soldered in stuff all around, nonstandard parts that make it useless for use as a standard PC or gaming console.
ObsidianZed@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Sorry, I was stating that “much like their laptops, I like the idea of these desktops.” I was not trying to insinuate that they themselves are alike.
missphant@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
I hate how power hungry the regular desktop platform is so having capable APUs like this that will use less power at full load than a comparable CPU+GPU combo at idle, is great, though I think it needs to become a lot more affordable.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This is a standard a370 mini PC at a high price.
There’s Beelink, Minisforum, Aoostar and many others.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The AI max chips are a completely different platform, more than double the physical silicon size of most minipc chips.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Most miniPC vendors have already announced AI Max products:
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I really hope this won’t be too expensive. If it’s reasonably affordable i might just get one for my living room.
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
they already announced pricing for them.
1099 for the base ai max model with 32gb(?), 1999 for fully maxed with the top sku.
SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 2 months ago
With a cheeky comparison to Apples nearly $5k offering.
jivandabeast@lemmy.browntown.dev 2 months ago
$1k for the base isn’t horrible IMO, especially if you compare it to something like the mac mini starting at $600 and ballooning over $1k to increase to 32GB of “unified memory” and 1tb of storage.
I get why people are mad about the non-upgradable memory but tbh I think this is the direction the industry is going to go as a whole. They can’t get the memory to be stable and performant while also being removable. It’s a downside of this specific processor and if people want that they should just build a PC
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Bummer
cholesterol@lemmy.world 2 months ago
These little buggers are loud, right?
xradeon@lemmy.one 2 months ago
Hmm, probably not. I think it just has the single 120mm fan that probably doesn’t need to spin up that fast under normal load. We’ll have to wait for reviews.
cholesterol@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I also just meant given the size constraints in tiny performance PCs. More friction in tighter spaces means the fans work harder to push air. CPU/GPU fans are positioned closer to the fan grid than on larger cases. And larger cases can even have a bit of insulation to absorb sound better. So, without having experimented with this myself, I would expect a particularly small and particularly powerful (as opposed to efficient) machine to be particularly loud under load. But yes, we’ll have to see.
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
The Noctua fan option should be pretty quiet.
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I have a Noctua fan in my PC. Quiet AF. I don’t hear it and it sites beside me.
SuperSleuth@lemm.ee 2 months ago
What’s crazy is I still can’t make it onto their website without waiting in a 20 minute queue. Stupid.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Are they going to at least make memory modules available for those who want to soldsr their own?
naonintendois@programming.dev 2 months ago
You can order those directly from chip suppliers (mouser, digikey, arrow, etc.) for a lower cost than you could get them from framework. Also those are going to be very difficult to solder/desolder. You’re going to need a hot air station, and you need to pre-warm the board to manage the heat sink from the ground planes.
Trimatrix@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Not as impossible sounding. I mean I would never attempt it but you might be able to get away with it using a stencil, solder paste and one of those fancy toaster ovens with a broil setting. ROI would suck since you are probably gonna fail the first couple of times.
billiam0202@lemmy.world 2 months ago
So can someone who understands this stuff better than me explain how the L3 cache would affect performance? My X3D has a 96 MB cache, and all of these offerings are lower than that.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This has no X3D, the L3 is shared between CCDs. The only odd thing about this is it has a relatively small “last level” cache on the GPU/Memory die, but X3D CPUs are still kings of single-threaded performance.
This thing has over twice the RAM bandwidth of the desktop CPUs though, and some apps like that. Just depends on the use case.
javacafe@lemm.ee 2 months ago
[deleted]brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I guess that’s kinda the point? It will ship with 128GB soldered.
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 2 months ago
To anyone complaining about non-replaceable RAM: This machine is for AI, that is why.
Think of it like a GPU wirh a CPU on the side, vs the other way around.
Inference requires very fast ram transfer speed, and that is only possible (currently) on soldered buses. Even this is pretty slow at 256Gb/s, but it’s RAM size of 96GB to GPU makes it interesting for larger models.
commander@lemmings.world 2 months ago
Looks like a pile of shit for easily-impressionable morons, but that’s to be expected from framework.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What exactly do you want instead?
commander@lemmings.world 2 months ago
Great products for great prices!
Punchshark@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Xbox with the ability to run windows is what the article is basically saying.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Or linux.
This thing makes a whole lot of pricey workstations obsolete.
Punchshark@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I think I need to give Linex a try again. I tried ubuntu in 2008 but found it too difficult to do the things I was used to doing on windows. I now have a bit more coding experience and will probably pick it up quicker
Ulrich@feddit.org 2 months ago
What kind of workstations?
grue@lemmy.world 2 months ago
😒🍎
simple@lemm.ee 2 months ago
To be fair it starts with 32GB of RAM, which should be enough for most people. I know it’s a bit ironic that Framework have a non-upgradeable part, but I can’t see myself buying a 128GB machine and hoping to raise it any time in the future.
Ulrich@feddit.org 2 months ago
Yes that’s the problem.
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Yeah hugely disappointed by this tbh. They should have made a gaming capable steam machine in cooperation with valve instead :)
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah.
But that’s AMD’s fault, as they gimped the GPU so much on the lower end. There should be a “cheap” 8-core, 1-CCD part with close to the full 40 CUs… But there is not.
4am@lemm.ee 2 months ago
They still could; this seems aimed at the AI/ML research space TBH
Toes@ani.social 2 months ago
Would 256GB/s be too slow for large llms?