Technology

"To enable the massive 256GB/s memory bandwidth that Ryzen AI Max delivers, the LPDDR5x is soldered," writes Framework CEO Nirav Patel in a post about today's announcements. "We spent months working with AMD to explore ways around this but ultimately determined that it wasn’t technically feasible to land modular memory at high throughput with the 256-bit memory bus. Because the memory is non-upgradeable, we’re being deliberate in making memory pricing more reasonable than you might find with other brands."

😒🍎

Edit: to be clear, I was only trying to point out that "we’re being deliberate in making memory pricing more reasonable than you might find with other brands" is clearly targeting the Mac Mini, because Apple likes to price-gouge on RAM upgrades. ("Unamused face looking at Apple," get it? Maybe I emoji'd wrong.) My comment is not meant to be an opinion about the soldered RAM.

At first I was skeptical during the announcement and then I saw the amount of ram and the rack. Imho it is not for enduser but for business. In fact we have workloads that would be perfectly fit that computer so why not?

Framework releasing a Mac Mini was certainly not on my bingo card for this year.

The Framework Desktop is powered by an AMD Ryzen AI Max processor, a Radeon 8060S integrated GPU, and between 32GB and 128GB of soldered-in RAM.

The CPU and GPU are one piece of silicon, and they're soldered to the motherboard. The RAM is also soldered down and not upgradeable once you've bought it, setting it apart from nearly every other board Framework sells.

It'd raise an eyebrow if it was a laptop but it's a freakin' desktop. Fuck you framework.

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?

It's kinda cool but seems a bit expensive at this moment.

Lmao the news about this desktop is strangling their website to the point of needing a 45 minute waiting list

This is not really that interesting and kinda weird given the non-upgradability, but I guess it's good for AI workloads. It's just not that unique compared to their laptops.

I'd love a mid-tower case with swappable front panel I/O and modular bays for optical drives; would've been the perfect product for Framework to make IMO.

Holy moly this is awesome! I am in for the 128GB SKU.

That's 96GB of usable VRAM! And way more CPU bandwidth than any desktop Zen chip.

I know people are going to complain 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. This isn’t artificial crippling, it physically has to be soldered, at least until LPCAMM catches on.

My only ask would be a full X16 (or at least a physical X16/electrical x8) PCIe slot or breakout ribbon. X4 would be a bit of a bottleneck for some GPUs/workloads… Does Strix Halo even support that?