IRC channel logs

2022-06-01.log

back to list of logs

<stikonas[m]>OK, normal mode works though --repo mode might be broken
<Hagfish> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31575765#31576741 "On the list of things that we are exploring ways to improve on in the future: ... Moving to open UEFI/BIOS solutions."
<Hagfish>i would have thought that was easier than open hardware designs, but at least it's on the list of things they are "exploring"
<oriansj>Hagfish: coreboot or libreboot support would have been a better firmware direction but it is up to them to do that work and thus all I can say is atleast it is progress.
<oriansj>relative to where they previously existed.
<tinybronca[m]><muurkha> "tinybronca: when we say that..." <- Weird, I thought 130nm meant the half-pitch between identical features was that wide
<tinybronca[m]><Hagfish> "i would have thought that was..." <- I don't wanna buy more Intel gear personally I will not buy Framework
<Hagfish>yeah, that's another way they could set a good example, but they have to pick their battles i guess
<tinybronca[m]>"pick your battle" eehhh continuing Intel dominance is not helping
<muurkha> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count maybe is a more reliable way to estimate: PIII Tualatin was 45 million transistors in 81 mm² in 130nm, thus 556,000 transistors per mm²; Itanium 2 was 592 million transistors in 432 mm², thus 1.37 million transistors per mm²
<muurkha>also in 130nm
<muurkha>by coincidence this happens to be pretty close to my guess of 600,000 transistors per mm² in 130nm
<unmatched-paren>tinybronca[m]: the alternative is AMD, which is worse, or ARM, which is still pretty bad and not even an option for some people. the Talos POWER CPUs are incredibly expensive, and i don't think anyone could comfortably use a RISC-V right now. it's a rather unfortunate situation, and people do need to make compromises
<unmatched-paren>personally, i'll be getting a framework laptop pretty soon i think :) a shame they don't use free UEFI yet, though. much better than what i currently have
<Hagfish>yeah, that's a metric i've used in the past: it doesn't have to be perfect, or even the best, as long as it's better (in terms of freedom) than what it's replacing
<Irvise_>And talking about open silicon... https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Google-Open-Silicon-Portal
<stikonas[m]>unmatched-paren: Why are AMD CPUs worse than Intel for bootstrapping?
<stikonas[m]>(Or privacy?)
<stikonas[m]>I guess more intels have coreboot
<stikonas[m]>But it's either ME or PSP black boxes, so similar on that front
<unmatched-paren>stikonas[m]: i thought AMD was slightly worse for blobs? but maybe that's just the GPUs
<stikonas[m]>unmatched-paren: I think just GPUs
<stikonas[m]>Well, Intel's blob is burned into ROM, while AMDs is uploaded by driver
<stikonas[m]>unmatched-paren: it might be that if you want Intel GPU, you won't be able to use AMD CPU, since Intel GPUs are integrated
<stikonas[m]>But I might be wrong here...
<tinybronca[m]><unmatched-paren> "tinybronca: the alternative is..." <- I do not consider AMD worse, as the claim is their PSP does not even have "remote management" capabilities but I don't know how to verify this or if a tool like me_cleaner exists
<tinybronca[m]><unmatched-paren> "tinybronca: the alternative is..." <- I do not see why ARM is not option, there are SBCs, laptops, and desktop/server motherboards
<tinybronca[m]><Hagfish> "yeah, that's a metric i've..." <- I do not see Framework laptops as better in freedom at all, they just more modular/repairable physically, they apparently don't even release full libre PCB schematics
<tinybronca[m]><stikonas[m]> "Well, Intel's blob is burned..." <- I do not know how to access firmware in iGPU ROMs to know how big it is or that it even exists, do you have more info [stikonas](https://matrix.to/#/%40stikonas%3Akde.org) ??
<stikonas[m]>tinybronca: no, I don't have any more info
<stikonas[m]>But it might not be igpu but just Intel gpus (in case Intel releases standalone GPUs at some point)