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Comment by _rtff | Hacker News Reader

IIRC, Framework did ask AMD to explore a more repairable approach with socketable CPU and RAM for these chips and they did but came back and said it wouldn't perform well enough that way.

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It's not really about performance, it's about signal integrity. AMD said that even with LPCAMM2, you just wouldn't be able to send a clean enough signal from all these different memory channels to the chip, and they insisted on a soldered design because they just couldn't make anything else work.

Technically it's not wrong to say it's about performance in the sense that if you clocked the RAM slow enough you probably could maintain signal integrity, but we're not talking some small hit to performance here, it'd probably be more like a multi-generational drop in memory bandwidth.

And that is where Framework should have stepped in and said “we as a company value repairability, so we will take the performance hit to make the product easier to repair”

It doesn't work that way. AMD said they simply couldn't do it. It wasn't about taking some modest performance hit, it was that they couldn't make the chip function with modular memory due to signal integrity problems.

Then why not pick a CPU that is socketable? There are dozens of them on the market that Framework could have picked for their Desktop product.

None of them have something even close to the memory bandwidth or integrated GPU performance of the Ryzen AI Max processors.

They want a Apple M_ Max like machine.

Why not put a big fat Ryzen 9 chip in it? Most people use their computer for browsing the web, playing some games, doing some spreadsheets. A standard CPU would have been more than powerful enough for that and the Desktop would be more repairable.

There's a million machines that are just as upgradeable as anything Framework could make if you just want a big fat Ryzen 9.

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