And the reason for that is b/c of Moore's Law approaching its end.
The way to manufacture more efficient compute now is do things like put DRAM closer to the chip and even closer integration between CPU and GPU. The fact that Apple can co-design their silicon such that the CPU and GPU can pull from the same pooled RAM is a major advantage over competitors. There are also latency and bandwidth benefits how they setup their RAM just from pure physics. And chip manufacturing is moving towards chiplets where you have cores manufactured separately and then wired together at nanoscale level on top of a silicon interposer.
The current best-practice unfortunately is closer to Apple's "hemetically sealed appliance" philosophy, and not the "I build my own PC" philosophy.
When you have CPU, GPU, and even DRAM sitting on the same "die" the only things you're going to be swapping out on your Framework laptop are going to be relatively trivial.
This is actually great. The laptop body stays the same and you swap out a small mini circuit board that has the CPU + GPU + DRAM on it.
This is the point of the Framework laptops. They are just unfortunately stuck with non-Apple parts and thus are slow / inefficient.
Maybe Qualcomm can make a motherboard for Framework high end laptops with their Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme ARM-based CPUs that are supposedly competitive with Apple's M4 offerings?
And then offer a cut down Qualcomm mobile phone CPU + GPU + DRAM offering for the Framework 12 so that it can compete on price/performance with the MacBook Neo?
I think you need to complete with Apple with the right equivalents.
The benefits of modularity begin to get outweighed by the costs when 85% of the cost of the machine needs to be swapped out with each upgrade. For consumers, why would they not simply opt to spend the rest of the 15% to get a whole new computer?
I can see why the manufacturer would want this. As a user though why would you? If the rest of the body is familiar and works well, why toss it?
Maybe the sentiment springs from the general culture of consumerism and new-is-better thinking, and historically that's been warranted in the consumer electronics space. Most things aren't really like that though. Humans have long built tools, clothing, furniture, and infrastructure designed to last a long time. You commit resources up front to make sure the thing is of high quality and then benefit for anywhere between decades to centuries. Replacement carries the risk of downgrading. Again, rapid technological advancement has blown this way of doing things away, but at some point parts of the tech plateau and this will need to be rediscovered. For things like keyboards, trackpads, and laptop cases, I don't see how "new" will beat "good" from this point on. Even displays are starting to reach limits. This seems like the right time to be working on "here is your reliable human interface device, drop in whatever crazy magic chip fabs have cooked up every X years to keep it capable."
From a humanist perspective there's another reason to move this way. People like to grow attached to objects and tools. Something has been lost in the shuffle of swapping out our most personal objects every few years.
- NVMe drive (or two)
- Bright, wide gamut, high resolution screen
- Aluminum case
- Great keyboard
- Wifi/ports
- Battery
[1] https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform-rcore-rk3588-proc...
People have been hyping things like this for decades, but then it turns out the number of applications that need to frequently share data between a CPU and GPU at a faster speed than PCIe can handle are pretty uncommon. Meanwhile putting them closer together has some pretty significant real disadvantages, because then you're trying to deliver more power and dissipate more heat over a smaller area instead of putting more physical separation between the two largest loads in the machine.
Notice that high end PC GPUs are significantly faster than any of Apple's integrated GPUs, and that's why.
> There are also latency and bandwidth benefits how they setup their RAM just from pure physics.
Soldering RAM has a modest latency advantage over SODIMMs at the most extreme timings and CAMM turns even that into basically nothing.
> And chip manufacturing is moving towards chiplets where you have cores manufactured separately and then wired together at nanoscale level on top of a silicon interposer.
You're describing a move to less integration. They were originally on the same die, and the change has no real effect on modularity. The user doesn't even have to know that some Ryzen CPUs have a separate I/O die or more than one compute die, they all still fit into the same socket and are even interchangeable with the ones that have only a single die.
Lots of laptops have integrated graphics. And many recent CPUs have strong integrated graphics. They're not doing anything special there. I don't understand why that gets so much attention.
The special thing they do is having very wide bandwidth on the higher end models, to a CPU with integrated graphics. That doesn't affect the Neo though.
What sort of physics? Dedicated GPUs achieve massive memory bandwidth without needing to put all of their memory on-die.
But even there, the fastest AI accelerator GPUs are putting memory on die, and using chiplet designs, to get the memory closer and closer to the cores.
Ideally, RAM and compute should be combined. That's kind of what our brains do. We'll probably need more mature memristor technology to achieve that one day.
People have been calling the top on Moore's Law for at least as long as I've been buying computers. (~20 years). I'll believe it when I see it.
No it isn't. We are going more parallel and the transistor counts will continue to rise.
It can be an advantage, it also has downsides though. LPDDR5 is fairly slow as far as GPU memory goes, and on Apple Silicon it splits the bandwidth across the entire chipset. Many recent Macbooks have dGPU-tier hardware constrained by Wintel-laptop memory bandwidth.
And if Apple uses DDR5, why not CAMM? If Apple uses NVMe, why not M.2? Many of the advantages you've listed are marginal compared to the real-world constraints of the hardware, and cover up some boneheaded decisions that don't significantly impact the laptop's efficiency.
Apple still lives in its walled garden and defends it vociferously, but I would argue they have made the correct design tradeoffs for their business.
The issue is that this in no way requires soldered memory. CAMM2 supports speeds up to 9600 MT/s. You can get over 300 GB/s from two CAMM2 sockets.
It's an acceptable approach for iPad-level stuff, but for professional workstations and desktops it's not competitive.
