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I think there is also a huge benifit for OEMs: it would reduce the cost of developping a Ryzen system. If you're Asus and you want to make a Ryzen motherboard,

I think there is also a huge benifit for OEMs: it would reduce the cost of developping a Ryzen system. If you're Asus and you want to make a Ryzen motherboard, you have to write or license a BIOS. If Ryzen supports coreboot, this is something you no longer have to do and the system is much closer to working out of the box. The downside for OEMs is that a lot of them use the BIOS as a way to differentiate themselves with extra features. I think there is going to be some initial resistance because of this but it shouldn't be too major.

wolfgke 10y ago
> I think there is also a huge benifit for OEMs: it would reduce the cost of developping a Ryzen system. There is also a huge potential disbenefit for OEMs: It can make it more difficult to "stand out" from competition by offering a firmware (UEFI, BIOS) that has vendor-specific "advantages": OEMs do of course like implementing such mainboard-vendor-specific modifications; I also heard there seem to be in particular gamers who love such implementations that offer more "graphical bling" in the UEFI firmware. Since when open firmware becomes a desired property of mainboards, OEM will have to be better in terms of concrete features of the hardware instead of graphical tricks to stand out from competition (which is hard work), I can also imagine quite well that OEMs are cautious about such open firmware desires.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  > It can make it more difficult to "stand out" from competition by offering a firmware (UEFI, BIOS) that has vendor-specific "advantages" Not really. Look at what Samsung does to Android. Let the upstream maintainers do 99.7% of the real work, then change five random things for no reason other than to be able to claim your competitors don't have that.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    It is a long and prosperous tradition. Just look at all the versions of unix out there.

wolfgke 10y ago

> I think there is also a huge benifit for OEMs: it would reduce the cost of developping a Ryzen system. There is also a huge potential disbenefit for OEMs: It can make it more difficult to "stand out" from competition by offering a firmware (UEFI, BIOS) that has vendor-specific "advantages": OEMs do of course like implementing such mainboard-vendor-specific modifications; I also heard there seem to be in particular gamers who love such implementations that offer more "graphical bling" in the UEFI firmware. Since when open firmware becomes a desired property of mainboards, OEM will have to be better in terms of concrete features of the hardware instead of graphical tricks to stand out from competition (which is hard work), I can also imagine quite well that OEMs are cautious about such open firmware desires.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> It can make it more difficult to "stand out" from competition by offering a firmware (UEFI, BIOS) that has vendor-specific "advantages" Not really. Look at what Samsung does to Android. Let the upstream maintainers do 99.7% of the real work, then change five random things for no reason other than to be able to claim your competitors don't have that.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  It is a long and prosperous tradition. Just look at all the versions of unix out there.