DeepComputing: Early Access Program for RISC-V Mainboard for Framework Laptop 13

A lot of comments are focusing on the value as a RISC-V development platform, which is obviously important, but I'm also hopeful that this presages more Framework mainboard options besides just what Framework itself offers. There is already a pretty big community offering I/O modules beyond Framework's options, but the true benefit of a Framework system is in the ability to not be locked in to only what one company things is worth the time and effort to develop. This is the first inkling that that benefit might actually come about.

There's not really a lot of room for anyone to make a board that isn't a curiosity or highly-specific developer platform though. Framework already have both x86 vendors covered for people who want Intel or AMD. The only other chip worth making a board for is Snapdragon X Elite. There's nothing else in the same performance class.

I hope it becomes a standard format for developer boards

There's the possibility of making mainboards with other features though, built-in FPGAs, SDRs, or maybe lower-powered x86 chips for more battery life.

I guess that all falls under "curiosity", but I really do hope that the ecosystem for framework compatible parts blow up.

> that isn't a curiosity or highly-specific developer platform though

So what? It would be great to use this as a developer platform because you have the whole chassis and peripherals of a laptop and all you have to make is the mainboard

lower-powered x86 has little chance anymore. In 10 years from now, just about every portable system will be ARM-like.

Oh, come on.

You just know someone's gonna make an Amiga one.

And a whole bunch of aging German and Scandinavian hackers are gonna come out and try to convince people, no seriously, this is a great daily driver, you just have to go to Aminet and get the right RTG driver pack for the display panel and...

We have gotten inbound interest from other Mainboard makers too, at least one of which is pretty far along on a design.

Performance per watt is nearly identical for the Apple M4 and the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, despite the Ryzen being manufactured on 4nm while the M4 is on 3nm: https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/3

Sorry to burst your bubble.

The biggest thing I want to see from framework is ARM (or better, Risc-V that achieves great low power performance) with an enormous battery and linux or BSD with all the optimizations to improve battery life.

I bought a macbook a while ago specifically because I can get it to last about 45-50 hours non-stop usage on one charge, so getting a system tailored for even better performance and a longer battery life (macbooks could probably double or triple battery life if they bulked up and stopped trying to be so petite) would be incredible.

>100 hour battery lifes should be very achiebable for developers, as limiting screen brightness and using only terminal with a black background can increase battery life _enormously_.

You charts show the M4 having a more than 2x advantage in both MIPS per watt and MB per Joule over the Ryzen

Read through the article. Ryzen wins a few, and from a worse node, and with off-package dram, and a much more capable GPU.

I agree that would be a delight. I'd even take a color eink or transmissive / reflective LCD to lower the display power draw. But I would still like to be able to equip it with large amounts of storage and ram.

"off-package dram"

Yes, the real ARM vs. x86 discussion will come around Ryzen Max 2025Q1 with 128mb on-package dram (hope we get desktop board manufacturers to sell this).

Would you be okay if they compete with your mainboards? For example, they produce a lower price AMD board.

Between Zoom (not the whole time, but just by having it in the background), Slack and Crowdstrike's Falcon agent, I usually can't make more than 5 or 6 hours away of a wall outlet with my MacBook Pro M2 Max...

I hate corporate software.

That's awesome to hear! I'm really excited to see the framework ecosystem grow.

This is basically similar to what made the IBM PC successful. They opened up the bus architecture, and the market for add-in cards exploded.

(being IBM, they later tried to "upgrade" to a locked-down microchannel bus, but it happily didn't go anywhere)

other things got standardized (motherboards, power supplies, peripherals, etc) and it has been going ~ 40 years now.

>They opened up the bus architecture, the market for add-in cards exploded.

Price and size and overall state of tech back then didn't really allow to have several PCs in one (for some rare and pricey exceptions like PowerPC CPU extension boards, etc.). These days we can potentially have inside regular size laptop a backboard with standard bus (something like Sipeed cluster board which takes up to 7 credit card sized SoCs [1]) into which we can potentially plug various SoCs of the same or different arc. Say one SoC is RISC-V, one x86 and several SoCs with powerful NPUs - configure your laptop(cluster) for the mission at hand. Dare i say from a common bin of parts in the office (or even from public library - the SoCs are just tens of dollars nowdays, like say a game cartridge).

[1] one can imagine if the cards were inserted at angle instead of vertically https://www.amazon.com/Sipeed-Lichee-Cluster-High-Performanc...

what does 128mb on package dram help with? That seems like it's way to small to suspend to ram or anything.

"640kb should be enough for everyone"

Joke aside, typo, s/mb/gb/g - thanks for catching.

Oh, wow. That's a pity. I mean, you're down to the battery time of any random x86 laptop.

I usually get barely a working day out of my corporate MacBook Pro M1 with Corpo Security Special Sauce, CLion and Teams. But I have to kill CLion when it gets too crazy (i.e. often). Do you have any insights from Activity Monitor on who is draining the battery?

My biggest offenders: - Symantec Data Loss Prevention Agent (x86 Emulation) - $Corporation App Store (I never use it, don't know why it burns CPU time)

This corporate "security" software is the essence of everything that's wrong with a corporation.

An Arm motherboard would be a great thing for one of those third parties to make. I don't think Framework has the resources to take it on right now. It's time for them to do an update to the AMD boards, and they do a new Intel one every year...

Yet. There will be competition for the Snapdragon series. At least if Arm doesn't shot itself in the foot with lawsuits; if they do, the real action will shift to RISC-V. I'm sure that the Nuvia developers are already working on a RISC-V chip just in case...

There are limits to how enormous the battery can be. Over 100Wh and you can't fly with it, so nobody is going to do that. That's less than double the capacity of the current Framework battery.

If I check the "Last 12 hours app energy use" from my Activity Monitor it's usually Firefox, Zoom, Slack and PyCharm.

But that only shows "Apps", not processes. If I list all processes, the one that's almost always in the top is Crowdstrike Falcon. Specially when there's disk access, as it seems to intercept everything...