See also: The most expensive chip in the ARM world by Marcin Juszkiewicz [0]. It's written by a core AArch64 developer on the lack of a full-function boot ROM o

See also: The most expensive chip in the ARM world by Marcin Juszkiewicz [0]. It's written by a core AArch64 developer on the lack of a full-function boot ROM on most ARM single-board computers, forcing developers and users to fight with vendor-specific bootloaders. > So SBC… Which means playing with U-Boot. In the past it meant random fork of it. [...] you have bootloader(s) built. The next step is taking microsd card, finding out which offsets to use. Then put bootloader(s) at proper places so CPU can read them and boot. Usually it also means that you have to use MBR style formatting [...] The reason? A EEPROM chip is too expensive, an astronomical cost of $3! The author was half-joking, but only serious - $3 is really expensive for most single-board computers. > The solution is SPI flash chip. But it is very expensive - 3 (three) EUR for 512Mb (64MB) chip (if bought 1000 of them). Far too much for 99.99% of SBC probably. Probably 64/128Mb will be enough even. And they are cheaper (128Mb is 1.7 EUR). Still too expensive… [0] https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2020/01/29/the-most-expensive-chip-in-the-arm-world/ https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2020/01/29/the-most-expens...