Framework just announced their Desktop computer: an AI powerhorse?
Recently I’ve seen a couple of people online trying to use Mac Studio (or clusters of Mac Studio) to run big AI models since their GPU can directly access the RAM. To me it seemed an interesting idea, but the price of a Mac studio make it just a fun experiment rather than a viable option I would ever try.
Now, Framework just announced their Desktop compurer with the Ryzen Max+ 395 and up to 128GB of shared RAM (of which up to 110GB can be used by the iGPU on Linux), and it can be bought for something slightly below €3k which is far less than the over €4k of the Mac Studio for apparently similar specs (and a better OS for AI tasks)
What do you think about it?
How is this preferable to just building your own itx machine?
I understand the appeal of a framework laptop, where getting a chassis and mainboard with extended hardware support is otherwise impossible. But how is this better than the existing options?
Probably it is equivalente to a custom itx machine, the thing I was impressed about was the CPU they used that combined with fast RAM could be very good for hosting locale LLMs
Memory bandwidth is 256GB/sec, much less than M4 Max (526GB/s) or M2 Ultra (800GB/s). Expect performance to reflect that.
It’s comparable to the M4 Pro in memory bandwidth but has way more RAM for the price.
Good point. You can’t even get an M* Pro with 128GB. Only the Max and Ultra lines go that high, and then you’ll end up spending at least twice as much.
