Hi,
Uwe Hermann schrieb:
The SMSC FDC37N958FR, a datasheet is on the web. See http://www.coreboot.org/Dell_Latitude_CPi_A366XT_Build_Tutorial for some more (but not too many) details.
That one looks interesting - I did not expect the 8051 to be able to f.e. take over full control of the PC's parallel port!)
While control over the parallel port today probably only has some geek value it shows to me that some _serious_ tasks would have been possible with this (probably around 2001) hardware without switching on the main CPU. Likely the 8051 of that very hardware has comparable CPU power to early 198x home computer hardware. Not too bad!
This 2001 potential is simply not used / is not available to users of a 2008 (TwoThousandAndEight) PC or notebook. A rather long time in tech terms.. Worse: To my experience nowadays user is not even likely to be able to control what the system fan does. (Hmm, I admit this statement relates to my limited experience with a pretty recent Gigabyte AM2+ board.)
The disparity of the potential of the Embedded Controller and the things the user can actually do with it is (IMHO as things currently are) only bound to grow.
There are high hurdles to be taken but given this growing disparity at some point in time an Open Source EC simply _is_ attractive.
Greetings, Frieder