[coreboot] [RFC] Porting coreboot to Intel Atom (Silverthorne) & SCH US15W (Poulsbo) chipset

[Ken.Fuchs at bench.com]

> 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