Ken Fuchs wrote:
Any suggestions and comments are welcome.
Thanks Carl-Daniel for your opinions on porting coreboot to the Atom/Poulsbo, but I'd like to address your suggestion of AMD as alternative first.
Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:
My first suggestion would be to investigate if you can find a matching platform from AMD. While Intel docs are difficult to get and sometimes even wrong, AMD provides fast access to good documentation and they even employ a few excellent engineers who work on coreboot and contribute all of their code (they contributed Barcelona processor support at the time it became available commercially). That's why I recommend AMD. Besides that, saying "we chose AMD because of coreboot" helps those nice AMD guys to justify and strengthen the development effort they invest into coreboot and everyone benefits.
I really do like this suggestion for the reasons mentioned. I have also found that AMD is much easier to work with than Intel. When AMD sees a business opportunity they turn the information facet on full for you. With Intel, you seem to have to ask for each individual piece of information, leaving you wonder when the next drop (of information) will fall.
Thanks for the great suggestion, but AMD doesn't seem to have a low power embedded "platform" like the Silverthorne/Poulsbo combo which uses only 5W maximum total at the highest clock for these parts. I understand that the Poulsbo is 2.7 W at all speeds and Atom ranges from 1.6 W to a maximum of 2.3 W based on clock speed of the part.
One of the hardware engineers on our project claims that AMD doesn't have any processor using less than 30 W, but I couldn't believe that. I searched for an AMD processor with low wattage requirements, but the best I could find was this Sempron at 25 W (for just the processor).
http://products.amd.com/en-us/NotebookCPUDetail.aspx?id=14
AMD must have processors with lower wattage requirements, right?
Maybe some as yet unreleased product?
Sincerely,
Ken Fuchs