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

[Timothy Pearson]

On 06/24/2018 06:41 PM, Timothy Pearson wrote:
> 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?
> 


So it was pointed out to me on IRC that we don't have current power
numbers published on the Wiki.  That would probably explain the
confusion; subsequent firmware updates have dropped the idle power and
"normal use" power significantly on the POWER9 chips.

I'll see if we can get some new at-wall measurements of our normal
desktop configuration (1 CPU, no SAS, NVMe storage).  This should be
well under 100W at the wall.

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