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

[Timothy Pearson]

On 06/24/2018 06:35 PM, Nico Huber wrote:
> On 24.06.2018 23:52, Timothy Pearson wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Hmmm, yeah, just twist my words as you wish. I never said that it is
> power hungry compared to other workstation systems. I did not even state
> that it is power hungry at all. All I said is that it needs power and
> somebody has to pay for that too.
> 
> Now you show off with random numbers that make things really weird. 10W
> for what? per chip? or per core? Whatever it is, I hope your office has
> air conditioning. And than that "it's using less power than the older
> Xeon", omg really? you're system is better than shit?
> 
> Nico


Did not mean to offend here.  Apparently we have very different ideas of
"workstation" versus "desktop"; we'd classify some dozens of watts under
real world load per CPU as a desktop, not as a workstation per se.  I
don't see how something using this little power would suddenly put the
power bills out of reach for individual use vs. corporate use, but again
we may have very different ideas of what a computer should be.

Personally, I would never be able to use something like a Raspberry Pi
or other low power SBC for anything other than maybe some minimal text
editing.  It's not worth my time to put up with a slow, unresponsive
system; whatever I would gain on power bills would be lost through
unproductive time and then some.

I don't see how providing some real world numbers can be frowned upon here?

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