On Monday 14 May 2007 10:20:10 ron minnich wrote:
one interesting thing: the BIOS costs are one reason that x86 has had trouble getting acceptance in the embedded space, i am told (by embedded systems vendors).
Another problem is that there's no x86 hardware to be accepted, at least in certain segments. For example there's nothing comparable to the Freescale MPC8349, a single chip containing a 500-1000 MIPS CPU, DDR2 controller, PCI bridge, 2 GigE NICs, USB controller, i2c and serial with a power budget of 4 or 5W. Of course this could just be the other side of a chicken-and-egg situation.
The x86 embedded space might be a lot more competitive when Intel finally ships its Tolopai SoC. So let's make sure LinuxBIOS is ready...
--Ed