Interesting that the FW13 is the least efficient Ryzen laptop (by far) in terms of power consumption. The Acer Swift wins hands down in terms of efficiency, but clearly suffers on the performance front. The P14s, however, has a lower peak wattage despite being on par, performance-wise, with the FW13.
I wouldn’t be surprised that an integrated and optimized system is more efficient than a modular setup is. I feel most people understood there were going to be some trade offs going to a modular system like this. The important thing is that in a few years, you can just drop in a new main board with better processor, something you won’t be able to do with the other laptops
The repairable design definitely has some drawbacks, but i rather have a 90% machine that can be upgraded than a 100% machine i need to buy New every 5 years or so.
Soldered parts are often, if not always more efficient and the P14s (which I have at work) has soldered ram, which greatly improves efficiency
Engineering, resources, tuning, component choice/availability and last but not least, soldered ssd and ram
From the article:
“The Framework 13 AMD laptop on Linux proved to be very capable and had no issues running at full performance and delivering the best results of the tested laptops. For those wanting to lower the CPU power consumption to extend the battery life, it’s possible to drop it into the power saver ACPI Platform Profile mode to lower the power threshold.”
A prebuilt laptop constructed by a major OEM would have the advantage of engineering optimization done in-house by leveraging strong technical relationships with their supply chain partners. They could carefully balance the appropriate hardware components to optimize for power draw. In the end, a prebuilt system will have everything locked down within a few variations of options, and the end user will basically only have the option to swap out the hard drive and RAM, that’s assuming these things are not pre-soldered to the mainboard. I think the engineering complexity for Framework is much higher because their key product feature is the capability to provide users with freedom of modularity. In that sense I think the sacrifice to power efficiency is something we have to live with for the time being. But it’s exciting in a way that I am very interested in seeing what tricks both the FW engineers and FW community can come up with to optimize these things down the road.