On Mon, 2008-06-23 at 13:56 +0100, Tiago Marques wrote:
Anyone has any idea of how much are the costs for using Pheonix or AMI's BIOS?
Cristi Magherusan wrote:
A few dollars per unit, i guess. I think their strong point is that they offer support for them and make them work on new board models.
The royalty per unit varies widely based on unit volume. For lower volumes, the royalty per unit can be about $10 or even more per unit.
However, the biggest external cost is the source code licensing fee. A full UEFI based source code license will cost up to $50,000 via a IBV (according to public UEFI documents as I recall). An IBV in this context would include AMI, Phoenix, Insyde and General Software. (A legacy BIOS is comparable in price and usually faster as well, a sad comment on UEFI.) If your board contains an embedded controller that laptops/mobile devices often require, the $50,000 figure may not cover the embedded controller's source code, so you can expect to pay a significant percentage more to include the embedded controller source code. There may even be an additional per unit royalty for the embedded controller source code.
So now you have a rough idea of the external costs that can be saved on mainboards that are already supported by coreboot and associated payloads. BTW, OpenEC is the only open source embedded controller I'm aware of and it partially supports a least a particular version of the OLPC as of the end of 2007 when development on it ceased. So, if you need embedded controller code, your lowest cost alternative will probably still be closed source as provided by an IBV or other third party that specializes in embedded controller code.
Sincerely,
Ken Fuchs