Out of surprise, nvidia &amd (Well there’s also qualcomm for those who care) are going ARM from 2025, presumably offering a single package SOC with both cpu&gpu? Or at least it would play quite differently, and I wonder if fw16 would suffice in its current form factor, or would there be a new fw15 etc in the works

  • Blowfish75@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Nothing surprising has really been announced. Nvidia has been making ARM chips for a long time and even tried to buy ARM. AMD has been talking about making ARM chips for a decade or more. This does not mean they are abandoning x86 anytime soon.

    Either way there shouldn’t be much impact to Framework. Eventually they will probably offer an ARM motherboard option, but I imagine it will be a while given all the headaches currently surrounding the use of ARM for Windows. And Linux for that matter. Vendor support has been abysmal.

  • Zeddie-@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I’m sure an ARM-based system can be done within the same motherboard form factor with both the 13 and 16. I don’t expect Framework to do it themselves anytime soon. They may not be the first to take it up on the first generation either. I’d rather makers do it themselves as a pet project since they are the trailblazers. A PoC (proof of concept) as it were.

    I don’t have the skills to do something like that, but it would be cool to see if someone creates a carrier board that lets a RPi work in a FW chassis. Or maybe an even more powerful ARM or even RISC-V based single board computer.

  • RafaelSenpai83@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I think there’s no reason to make a separate chassis for a different CPU architecture. Most likely it’ll be available as a new motherboard.

    As for a complications I’d say it’s kinda not clear whether it’ll be possible to swap components on the motherboard and boot any OS that has been compiled for this CPU architecture (like currently with PCs). Current devices that have ARM CPUs (smartphones and other single board computers like Raspbery Pi) require OS that has been built for that specific phone/board and additionally I haven’t seen any ARM board with replaceable RAM.