Framework shipped AMD 7040-series and 13th-gen Core i-series alongside each other for the 13.
The 13th-gen Intels had miserable battery life and heat issues under load. If you could manage that, all four USB-C ports were full Thunderbolt ports equally capable of driving displays, PD, and USB 4 throughput.
The AMD line had considerably better performance-per-watt but rougher firmware support (and early on, really broken Linux kernel support that required Fedora or other rolling kernel release distros). It also couldn't deliver the same "every port does everything" promise that the Intel boards did, with some ports not supporting displays or USB 4, which significantly reduced the value of the expansion-card model to kind of a novelty.
On the 12, if it's likely also going to have a smaller batter than the 13, going only with 13th-gen Intels means it likely will be either a further step back in battery life vs. the 13 or throttled to extend the battery.
The issue isn't TDP so much as performance-per-watt. The equivalent Ryzen 5 PRO 7540U can run at the same base TDP, had 2 full and four 4c cores on a smaller die, and outperformed the 1334U almost across the board.
Both chips were Q1 '23, so the timing's not a great excuse. They were in HP's 2023 EliteBook G10 840 (1334U) and 845 (Ryzen 5 PRO 7540) laptops, and the 845 was better on both single- and especially multi-thread Cinebench R23, _much_ better in GPU loads and gaming, _and also_ lasted longer on battery.
I think Framework mostly just wants to target an education market with a mainboard experience that's lower maintenance than AMD has been for them. Fewer USB-C restrictions, less firmware drama.
Still hard to get excited about it being the _only_ available option, though.
I would suppose they got a good deal on them, as they're a little out of date, but they're good enough, and overall provide a good package. If you're trying to hit a price point, there will always be compromises.
I don't know about the GP. I won't buy anything from Intel unless things change dramatically. My last Intel laptop had serious thermal throttling problem that could be completely avoided if Intel cared a bit about users. The one before had some other problems. In past 20 years, anytime I bought (or was given by a company) AMD I was happy, and as time goes by I get less and less happy with Intel.
i don't know about other people's experience - but my framework with intel cpu is always running that fan relatively maxed out even when it's not doing anything. And it has massive issues staying asleep which is some sort of driver issue with Windows. But I can be an airport and all of a sudden my backpack feels like it's about to combust and i can hear my laptop fan rippin', even though it should be asleep.
That is by design, it's a feature from Intel and Microsoft called "modern standby." It basically means your laptop cannot actually sleep anymore. Instead, it enters a slightly-lower-power mode so that it can download emails in the background, run Windows updates in the middle of the night, and generally pretend to be a phone even though no one wants that and the hardware/os was not really designed for it.
Modern Standby requires that deepest sleep states take less power than S3 standby, the issue is mainly drivers and applications either waking the system or not putting peripherals into deep enough sleep (or shutting them down entirely if possible)
Some new laptops cannot actually fully suspend to ram. It sounds crazy but I had this issue even after installing Linux on a laptop. It’s a hardware limitation. You can thank Microsoft for trying to make sure they can sneak in OS updates when you think your laptop is asleep.
It's not sneaking in OS updates, it's faster wake-up mainly.
Combined with properly prepared HW taking less power in modern standby than in S3, but it requires hardware/firmware/driver/userland confluence to work well
I'm not sure I had the same issue, it is a different laptop, but it would not go to sleep. The current solution is to make it hybernate instead of sleep.
just an anecdata but recently I was building a HTPC/NAS. Initially I wanted N100 for pure NAS, but ended up with an 5500 AMD and I was blown away by the capabilities of IGPU. Turned out to be a quite capable gaming machine.
And a 2-in-1 laptop in tent mode would be perfect for (casual) gaming on the train with a gamepad; much more ergonomic than holding one of the many heavy gaming handhelds.
The 13th-gen Intels had miserable battery life and heat issues under load. If you could manage that, all four USB-C ports were full Thunderbolt ports equally capable of driving displays, PD, and USB 4 throughput.
The AMD line had considerably better performance-per-watt but rougher firmware support (and early on, really broken Linux kernel support that required Fedora or other rolling kernel release distros). It also couldn't deliver the same "every port does everything" promise that the Intel boards did, with some ports not supporting displays or USB 4, which significantly reduced the value of the expansion-card model to kind of a novelty.
On the 12, if it's likely also going to have a smaller batter than the 13, going only with 13th-gen Intels means it likely will be either a further step back in battery life vs. the 13 or throttled to extend the battery.