Rui Carmo
It’s been pretty much impossible to go anywhere online without stumbling onto the Framework Desktop this week, but DHH’s take is more interesting than all of the gaming and AI fanfare around it because of its pragmatism.
Like I pointed out back in February, the Strix Halo iGPU and its unified memory architecture make it a very compelling setup, and even if [Jeff Geerling’s clustering antics are a bit over the top, the fact that we can now tweak VRAM allocation under Linux makes this a very viable alternative to a Mac Studio for me.
I’d love to review one, but I don’t think Framework even knows I exist…
After all, why should anyone pay four times as much the going rate for equivalent RAM and storage in something that can have a broadly similar power envelope?
I’ve been wanting to get my hands on one of these for both the ability to run local AI workloads and silent, power-efficient operation–and now that the Linux support is coming in the prospect of running a Fedora desktop on this kind of hardware is appealing enough for me to consider dropping macOS–I’ve spent the past few years slowly hedging my platform bets, and other than Mail.app and random compatibilty hassles, it wouldn’t be much of a change.
In the long run, APUs like this are the future for PCs of any size. Apple will of course keep improving their silicon, but the premium they charge for memory and storage makes no sense when AMD can match most of their performance for nearly half the going rate.