[coreboot] RISC-V HiFive Unleashed board added to coreboot - has PCI-e slots via exp board

[Timothy Pearson]

On 06/24/2018 03:43 PM, Nico Huber wrote:
> On 24.06.2018 21:37, Taiidan at gmx.com wrote:
>> On 06/24/2018 02:59 PM, ron minnich wrote:
>>> On Sun, Jun 24, 2018 at 11:47 AM Jonathan Neuschäfer <j.neuschaefer at gmx.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> "While we’d love to provide you with this information, we believe we
>>>> cannot. However, we can’t prevent anyone from disassembling the fsbl and
>>>> copying the values sent to the blackbox DDR register map."
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> and ... there ends my interest in the hifive. A shame.
>>>
>>
>> I can't understand what their target audience is? who would buy such a
>> thing? who do they intend to sell these to? I mean the open source
>> people can buy the now very affordable Talos 2L and the cheap-soc people
>> can buy one of the many of ARM boards that litter the marketplace...I
>> don't get it.
> 
> I don't think you can compare the HiFive Unleashed with the Talos. They
> really target completely different people and use cases. You could as
> well ask, why produce smart watches, when people can afford the Talos?
> 
> Talos is a workstation it doesn't fit anywhere but a workplace where
> somebody else pays the power bill. So you can't even compare it to
> cheap ARM SBCs, HiFive aside. It's a professional product, nothing to
> play with, but something to work with. And it's open. It is marketed
> as open. It is designed to be open. It is based on an open platform.

I just want to counter this one point.  POWER9 is absolutely not power
hungry.  I've seen the 8-core chips idle at under 10W, with active loads
maybe in the 40-60W range.  We're dogfooding one machine in a typical
office setting, and it dissipates nearly no heat -- it's using less
power than the older Xeon it replaced.

-- 
Timothy Pearson
Raptor Engineering
+1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line)
+1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard)
https://www.raptorengineering.com