Fully agree, but at the same time I'm hard pressed to think of an alternative that doesn't need binary blobs to bring up & is better in terms of power usage / e

Fully agree, but at the same time I'm hard pressed to think of an alternative that doesn't need binary blobs to bring up & is better in terms of power usage / efficiency. Most modern chips really can't initialize themselves anymore without feeding them some blob, most frequently for DDR controller calibration but also sometimes SERDES bits. That said I'm not sure why this should be treated harsher than if the same code were burned into a mask ROM on the chip. The latter case would be acceptable for "blob-free open hardware enthusiasts". It's a rather arbitrary distinction IMHO. add.P.S.: my personal goal would be a system where I control 100% of all running code starting at the bootloader. Most of these initialization blobs are one-shots, e.g. push the appropriate electronic parameters into some high-speed analog block. But this means no Intel ME & no AMD PSP, please. It also means no "power management" coprocessor (reasonably common on ARM SoCs), not even due to openness or trust concerns but rather because I've been bitten by bugs in those… :(