Framework Laptops Get Modular Makeover With RISC-V Main Board (theregister.com) 47
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Framework CEO Nirav Patel had one of the bravest tech demos that we've seen at a conference yet -- modifying a Framework Laptop from x86 to RISC-V live on stage. In the five-minute duration of one of the Ubuntu Summit's Lightning Talks, he opened up a Framework machine, removed its motherboard, installed a RISC-V-powered replacement, reconnected it, and closed the machine up again. All while presenting the talk live, and pretty much without hesitation, deviation, or repetition. It was an impressive performance, and you can watch it yourself at the 8:56:30 mark in the video recording.
Now DeepComputing is taking orders for the DC-ROMA board, at least to those in its early access program. The new main board is powered by a StarFive JH7110 System-on-Chip. (Note: there are two tabs on the page, for both the JH7110 and JH7100, and we can't link directly to the latter.) CNX Software has more details about the SoC. Although the SoC has six CPU cores, two are dedicated processors, making it a quad-core 64-bit device. The four general-purpose cores are 64-bit and run at up to 1.5 GHz. It supports 8 GB of RAM and eMMC storage. [...]
In our opinion, RISC-V is not yet competitive with Arm in performance. However, this is a real, usable, general-purpose computer, based on an open instruction set. That's no mean feat, and it's got more than enough performance for less demanding work. It's also the first third-party main board for the Framework hardware, which is another welcome achievement. The company has now delivered several new generations of hardware, including a 16-inch model, and continues to upgrade its machines' specs.
Now DeepComputing is taking orders for the DC-ROMA board, at least to those in its early access program. The new main board is powered by a StarFive JH7110 System-on-Chip. (Note: there are two tabs on the page, for both the JH7110 and JH7100, and we can't link directly to the latter.) CNX Software has more details about the SoC. Although the SoC has six CPU cores, two are dedicated processors, making it a quad-core 64-bit device. The four general-purpose cores are 64-bit and run at up to 1.5 GHz. It supports 8 GB of RAM and eMMC storage. [...]
In our opinion, RISC-V is not yet competitive with Arm in performance. However, this is a real, usable, general-purpose computer, based on an open instruction set. That's no mean feat, and it's got more than enough performance for less demanding work. It's also the first third-party main board for the Framework hardware, which is another welcome achievement. The company has now delivered several new generations of hardware, including a 16-inch model, and continues to upgrade its machines' specs.
Nice stunt (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nice stunt (Score:5, Informative)
I've broken various bits of my laptops over the years.
Screens, keyboards, and usb ports being the most common.
Framework has made it easy to deal with that.
Screen upgrades too-- it was nice to upgrade from 60hz to 120hz without having to throw a whole laptop away. .. and when I did upgrade from an older, more power-hungry intel CPU to a AMD one, I got to reuse the intel CPU to make a proxmox "box" (is a blade a box?) to use for other things.
It isn't perfect, but being able to upgrade and fix has been quite nice.
Gotta say.. Overall, I've been impressed, and hope to see more of the same in the future.
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when I did upgrade from an older, more power-hungry intel CPU to a AMD one, I got to reuse the intel CPU to make a proxmox "box" (is a blade a box?) to use for other things.
Oooo. Can you provide a bit more info or a link about this? What all is needed to run the old main board as a separate box/blade? That be the straw that tips me into getting a framework laptop :-)
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Put it in a case (3D-printable options available), plug in a USB-C PD power supply (65W minimum), and plug a monitor, keyboard, and (if you need it) mouse into some of the other USB-C ports (there are four, two on each side).
I'm still doing just fine with the 11th-gen CPU in mine (even bought another one just like it for my wife earlier this year), but when the time comes to upgrade it, I'm sure I'll find a use for the old motherboard.
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NICE! Thank you! And I just ran into mainboard cases by cooler master sold on frameworks site for just $39 (the mainboards themselves are kinda pricey though).
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Not sure I fully agree with that; there have been some incredible performance increases in laptops in the last few years, and incredible efficiency improvements as well. I went from a Dell Latitude with a 9th gen i7 to a Framework with an AMD 7840U and I've been completely blown away with the performance and efficiency compared to that ~6 year old Dell. CPU and GPU performance are incredible and yes will allow me to do stuff on them that I found taxing on the Dell. For the record I do a lot of CAD and CAM w
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Not really a replacement for the sort of dev board that breaks out a zillion headers and DIP switches and things; but compared to just your basic rectangular bare board it presumably cost a pretty modest amount to make the board in a
Well slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
This what you've always been bitching about. What excuses are you going to give as to why you won't buy it?
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Which one? if you mean Framework in general:
My current excuse for not buying a frame.work 16" is that i'm waiting for them to come out with an AMD Ryzen AI 300 based main board...
After that i'm also going to complain that it doesn't have socketed CAMM RAM (unless it does).
After that i'm going to complain that well even if i DON'T use the discrete GPU and bought the 16" just for better thermals, i wish it had hot-swap or nearly so capability instead of the maybe somewhat questionable connector it has.
Also,
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Can't you just get one and then upgrade relevant parts when need arises/they come out?
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Yeah def could, the main thing, in addition to my procrastination / foot dragging that the GP refers to, really is that i don't NEED a new laptop yet.
My ~5 year old ThinkPad X1 Extreme (gen1) (that i got for like $1500 back then) (and later upgraded to 32GB ram) is stable and currently still fine for my use of having like 1000 browser tabs open but not much else.
Only thing is that from that era (8th gen Intel) is power efficiency is pretty awful compared to now. Even when new it would last like 3 hours
Keyboard (Score:2)
Really what's stopping me is the keyboard. Home, End, Insert, Page up, Page down are basically unusable. However that seems to be true for virtually all laptop keyboards these days. Aren't these some of the most important keys out there??
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I, for one, write code for a living - and edit code written by others. Lots of navigation in text files. This might also apply to other professions based around text documents.
(Incidentally, because of this, I prefer keyboard shortcuts as far as possible for manipulating the program and operating system I am using: I do not want to move a hand away from the keyboard to a mouse and back, repeatedly - all that repositioning is time-consuming a
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The sibling post describes how important these are when editing text. I would think this kind of thing is common among the Slashdot crowd for coding, but I would think anybody who works with text would want these keys.
In addition to that, when using my terminal emulator (Konsole), I use shift-page-up (or -down) to scroll within a terminal window, and ctrl-page-up (or -down) to switch between tabs. In fact Firefox uses ctrl-page-up (or -down) to switch between tabs too.
Do people not use these features?
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FWIW, I don't use those, and I edit an absurd amount of text. How? xterms and vim.
Home: 1G
End: G
Page Down/Up: I don't really use these, but CTRL+F / CTRL+B (or for half page: CTRL+D / CTRL+U). If I need to jump a bit, I usually us a number and "j" to move down that many lines.
I do use SHIFT+INSERT to paste sometimes, but the Framework keyboard easily can do that via SHIFT+DEL (or maybe SHIFT+FN+DEL?). Speaking of, you can also FN+DOWN for page down, FN+up for page up, FN+left for home, FN+right for end. I'm
Only thing missing from the live demonstration. (Score:3)
Like the audience member shouted out afterward, "let's see it turn on!" Impressive demo nonetheless, but that would have made it doubly so.
Re:Only thing missing from the live demonstration. (Score:4, Interesting)
The audience member was the author of the article: me.
The amazing power of rehersal. (Score:2)
...he opened up a Framework machine, removed its motherboard, installed a RISC-V-powered replacement, reconnected it, and closed the machine up again. All while presenting the talk live, and pretty much without hesitation, deviation, or repetition. It was an impressive performance
Yes. The amazing power of doing something he likely practiced a half-dozen times in the week leading up to the event.
Re:The amazing power of rehersal. (Score:4, Informative)
Hi. Article author here. I am writing on an old Thinkpad, a W520. I have a bunch of them. My favourite is the X220. I've got 2 of them and I have lost count of how many times I've stripped them down, replaced RAM or SSD or keyboard or something, and rebuilt them again.
There is NO WAY I could do it in 5 min, no matter how long I practised.
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Even best laptop techs on the market cannot match that speed on a typical modern laptop. Not even close. These things are designed for ease of one time assembly, and tend to be an absolute bitch to take apart and put together afterwards.
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True, but not the point.
The point isn't that you can swap the Framework's motherboard fast. The point is, you can swap it at all.
You can buy a faster mobo, and you can reuse the old mobo. You can swap your keyboard. (Only for an an assortment of other crappy keyboards but people are working on it.) You can switch your USB-C port out for Ethernet or HDMI. You can have 2 HDMI ports if you want.
The point is, these things are maintainable, by the owners, without special gear.
My decade-old Thinkpads are too but
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You can in fact swap it fast though. There's no glue involved and plastic clips as far as they exist are multi-use rather than the "it will snap" type, it's all screws otherwise, it's modular rather than glued and soldered together, and everything is designed to be opened up and closed several times. I.e. it's similar to typical desktop.
Compared to typical laptop, where you get design specifically optimized for rapidity of assembly. Plastic snap-on clips are a norm, glue is common, and a lot of things are s
but will it run IRIX ? (Score:3, Interesting)
ive been waiting for a good board to run IRIX on since SGI discontnued the MIPS line which later transitioned to RISC V.
i'd love to have a native IRIX booting machine without resorting to MAME and its half broken MIPS emulation.
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I had a couple (Nothing exciting, an Indigo R3000 and an Indy R4400SC) and I'm not sure I see the appeal without some of the nicer hardware? Putting it aside, the only notable thing I can remember about IRIX besides the file manager was the lack of security.
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IRIX 5.3 and up were reasonably secure, quite comparable to Solaris and HP/UX actually. The Trusted IRIX variant was incredibly secure easily on par with Trusted Solaris, albeit at a performance cost(and with support contract costs to match, due to code and configuration vetting). Most of the "IRIX lacks security" comes from before IRIX 5.3 even, and a lot of it was created by self-proclaimed Unix gurus who put their SGI's, meant to be either sequestered in their own isolated networks or behind firewalls, d
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IRIX 5.3 and up were reasonably secure, quite comparable to Solaris and HP/UX actually.
IRIX 5.3 had xhost + in the default X config because SGI couldn't figure out how to do magic cookies. Tell us all about how secure that was.
Notable things about IRIX: GL/OpenGL accelerated desktop to make use of the graphics hardware properly(This one is really notable; SUN, HP and AIX machines with roughly comparable graphics hardware always felt sluggish when you started working with textured and shaded stuff in interactive mode).
You're comparing apples to oranges here. The graphics hardware was more capable on SGI machines, the others didn't have any 3d acceleration hardware until much later, if they ever got it. That's not an IRIX feature as much as an SGI hardware feature, which brings us back to... what is the point of IRIX without the hardware?
Compare all of that to Linux side: The integration between kernel level and user level when it comes to heavy duty graphics use can still be rather shaky from time to time, when someone somewhere in the byzantine mess changes something. Audio is a bloody mess. No matter how smooth JACK itself is, there's almost always something that goes wrong somewhere else(and no, it's not just Pulseaudio that is at fault...). The swear words and rants I hear about the Linux audio side from my partner on a regular basis informs me of that.
Your partner is half a decade out of date. They
Re: but will it run IRIX ? (Score:2)
Oops, meant to write that pipewire replaces both JACK and pulseaudio.
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"IRIX 5.3 had xhost + in the default X config because SGI couldn't figure out how to do magic cookies. Tell us all about how secure that was."
I know for a fact Solaris 2.5.1 had that enabled straight from the official installation media too, at least for the UltraSparcs I had to work on, and that came out in late 1995. So Silicon Graphics were not alone in that regard. And as we both know, there were some Linux distros that still did that into the 2000's.
"You're comparing apples to oranges here. The graphic
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Loongson chips are MIPS.
Loongson is shifting millions of units and making half a billion a year.
https://www.wsj.com/market-dat... [wsj.com]
That is not bad for a "dead" architecture.
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You mean that negative growth over the past 2 years is a healthy sign?? That -736.57% growth in net income is impressive, but for the wrong reasons.
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May not be great, but it's not dead. :-D
RISC-V laptops are sorely needed (Score:5, Insightful)
But there are better RISC-V laptops out there.
You see, even Linus (of Torvald's fame, not the Framework shareholder) said himself that one of the most important things for SW development (OSs included) is self-hosting. So, in order for a RISC-V ecosystem to develop faster, we need more RISC-V machines.
The good thing about the Framework RISC-V laptop is that, as the RISC-V architecture progresses and matures, one can cheaply change the Mobo and reap the benefits.
But, as of now, there are better RISC-V laptops. Some, in particular, include GPIO and I2S pins accesible from outside, for example de DCROMA or the SPACEMINT (so, not only good for development in general, but also for development for embeded in particular)
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I develop embedded systems for a living. I'm not sure why I'd need GPIO and I2S pins on my laptop directly when I can buy a simple USB to GPIO or I2S adapter. Heck, I have both hooked to my docking station so when I'm at the office I can work on them, but not sure why I'd ever need GPIO sitting at a coffee shop or on an airplane unless I feel like getting arrested for being mistaken for a terrorist building a bomb.
Can it boot any distro? (Score:3)
Hopefully the RISC V computers we see come to market (I mean real computers, not SBCs) will embrace some sort of open firmware to make it possible to boot easily from any device, and provide a means of enumerating hardware without devicetree. This RISC V board for framework is impressive, but I hope that it will allow installing any generic distro such as Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc, rather than just some specific Ubuntu fork. I also hope we'll see the same thing from ARM at some point. Until that happens, to me the Intel-compatible family of CPUs are the only way to go for general-purpose Linux computing.
Meanwhile I have all the same reservations about RISC V that I have about ARM. Much hay is made on slashdot and other open source communities that RISC V is open source. Even some companies have this idea they can just download a core and get someone to build a CPU out of it for them. The reality is RISC V is just as proprietary and encumbered as ARM is in most incarnations. While the core instruction set is license-free, unless you want to develop your own chip from scratch the cores available today for use in your custom SoC are all licensed. The end effect is it's not all that different from ARM.
What's the use case? (Score:2)
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As one other comment mentioned, it's a nice stunt but what would be the real world use case for this? Even if this was a server it seems unlikely that anyone wants to risk swapping for a different part in an environment demanding that level of HA
Time to market for this first-of-its-kind Laptop mainboard (and architecture) swap was wicked quick. The result is a product you could hand someone with IKEA Furniture type of instructions and they can install it themselves. No heat gun or adhesives faffe necessary; it's all there plain to see and it does not need to be better than anything else on the market to make the point that this invites more competition and innovation.
RISC-V happens to be a convenient vehicle for this innovation since people who wou
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Even if this was a server it seems unlikely that anyone wants to risk swapping for a different part in an environment demanding that level of HA
Right, why would you want a server where you can replace the MB in case of failure? Sure, you'll want to be able to quickly swap out storage devices, power supplies, and maybe RAM, but the ability to swap motherboards quickly and easily has no place in a high-availability server! Better the mainboard have numerous brackets, braces, jumpers, etc to contend with if the mainboard fails, right!
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It's like an edge case as a demonstration of their best effort to get to desktop-like upgradeability in laptops. Because fundamentally what framework has set to do is make laptops as modular as desktops. Where you can just take a component you want to change/upgrade, and change/upgrade that while keeping the rest of the machine.
Missing finale (Score:2)
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Presumably only if he has dual-boot storage set up otherwise what's it going to boot?
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Quite. That's why I asked if it turned on, not if it booted.
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Presumably the storage would have to be unplugged from the motherboard during the swap. This would be an opportunity to swap in an SSD with the OS on it.
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[Article author here]
That is what I asked at the end!
Framework (Score:2)
I'm looking at one for my next laptop, but I need better / more GPU options.
And a 16" screen is still a bit small for me.
I use a single "gaming" laptop for everything - it has the power to do whatever I like (including VR), but I can also just take it on holiday or sit on my sofa watching movies. Plus, it's its own UPS.
If you have to pick one machine to do everything on, a high-powered modular laptop would be ideal. But I would like a slightly bigger screen and a GPU option > 1 (if for no other reason