Arm comes to the Framework 13

TL;DR

MetaMP Computing's ARM mainboard for Framework 13 underperforms vs AMD and MacBook Neo in efficiency and price, making it a developer-only niche product.

Key Points

• 1.MetaMP Computing's ARM mainboard uses the Qualcomm 6P1 chip with four USB-C ports supporting power input and HDMI output. It runs Ubuntu 25.04 with Linux kernel 6.6 LTS due to incomplete upstream support, and the mainboard swap took only 10 minutes.
• 2.Geekbench performance lands between the MinisForum MSR1 and Radxa Orion O6, both using the same 6P1 chip. However, HPL floating-point benchmarks underperform expectations, likely due to a BIOS setting causing reduced memory bandwidth.
• 3.Gaming via FEX x86 emulation is effectively unplayable. Horizon Chase Turbo barely ran, Portal 2 stuttered heavily, and Doom Eternal/Abduction crashed the system by exhausting the 16GB shared RAM between CPU and GPU.
• 4.Windows on ARM installation failed repeatedly due to NTFS driver bugs, phase-zero hardware exceptions, and mid-install reboots. MetaMP Computing workarounds like disabling CPU cores or switching to 'work mode' only partially helped and are not officially supported yet.
• 5.Idle power draw is 7–8W at the wall with screen off, versus 2.7W for AMD Ryzen 5340 and under 1W for the MacBook Neo. With the display on, this board hits 10W compared to 3W for the Neo and 5W for AMD, severely hurting battery life.
• 6.Priced at ~$800 with memory (up from $550 launch), it matches the faster AMD Ryzen 5340 board and doubles the Neo's cost. The verdict: interesting for developers and future BIOS improvements may help, but right now the MacBook Neo is the better ARM laptop value.