715
The Framework Laptop 13 is about to become one of the world’s first RISC-V laptops
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
715 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
59534 readers
3195 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The processor it's using is linked in the article: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/08/29/starfive-jh7110-risc-v-processor-specifications/
It's a system-on-chip (SoC) design with an embedded GPU, the Imagination BXE-4-32, which appears to be designed mainly for smart TVs and set-top boxes.
The SoC itself only has two PCIe 2.0 lanes on separate interfaces so you can't use both for the same device, and one is shared with the USB 3.0 interface.
That's not even enough bandwidth to drive an entry-level notebook GPU from over a decade ago. Seriously: the GeForce GT 520M, launched January 2011, wants a full PCIe 2.0 x16 interface. Same with the Raedeon HD 6330M. You could probably get away with just 8 lanes if you had to, but not only one.
The other commenter wasn't kidding by saying you could get more power out of a Raspberry Pi 4. It's even mentioned in the article.
Connecting a GPU with just one PCIe lane isn't the biggest problem. You'll just slow down data exchange between the CPU and GPU (mostly loading textures and vertex positions).
If your game mostly relies on shaders and renders lots of rather static stuff, you'll mostly just get longer loading times but FPS shouldn't suffer too much.
Given how much modern games stream data in and out of VRAM, I think it would actually be quite a significant issue. Although, for modern games the 520M would probably be below minimum requirements anyway. It was just to illustrate my point.
It would be obviously "an issue" and drastically reduce performance in many cases, but compared to the buildin igpu, you'd probably still be able to get a much better performance for lots of applications.