Coreboot Starts Seeing Bits For AMD Barcelo

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Coreboot Starts Seeing Bits For AMD Barcelo

Early work is underway on Coreboot for AMD's Barcelo as the successor to Lucienne...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Barcelo-Coreboot-Starts

[DebianLinuxero]

AMD Barcelo is a bad name.

It may drive confusion with the first Phenom, named Barcelona.

[Drago]

We already have Zen3 + Vega 7/8. It is called Cezanne. What is this new chip actually?

[kalin]

are you telling me that it is possible to buy new pc that support coreboot ?

[jaxa]

We already have Zen3 + Vega 7/8. It is called Cezanne. What is this new chip actually?

Lucienne was a Renoir refresh. Barcelo will be a Cezanne refresh.

Lucienne was actually a nice refresh IMO. Here are the 3 models and their Renoir predecessors:

Ryzen 3 5300U = CPU: 4 cores, 2.6 GHz/3.8 GHz. GPU: 6 CUs, 1.5 GHz. Ryzen 3 4300U = CPU: 2.7/3.7 GHz. GPU: 5 CUs, 1.4 GHz.
Ryzen 5 5500U = CPU: 6 cores, 2.1 GHz/4.0 GHz. GPU: 7 CUs, 1.8 GHz. Ryzen 5 4500U = CPU: 2.3/4.0 GHz. GPU: 6 CUs, 1.5 GHz.
Ryzen 7 5700U = CPU: 8 cores, 1.8 GHz/4.3 GHz. GPU: 8 CUs, 1.9 GHz. Ryzen 7 4700U = CPU: 2.0/4.1 GHz. GPU: 7 CUs, 1.6 GHz.

So the CPU clocks had minor adjustments up or down, but each refresh model got an additional Vega compute unit with higher clocks. That's a decent graphics improvement.

Looking at Slickdeals, I notice the Lucienne APUs in laptops more often than Cezanne, and at decent price points. With Cezanne-U vs. Lucienne, I think you could be forgiven for not caring much about Cezanne. Rembrandt-U on the other hand will crush Barcelo on graphics performance and other features.

[NateHubbard]

AMD Barcelo is a bad name.

It may drive confusion with the first Phenom, named Barcelona.

The Phenom was so long ago, that I can't see how that would ever be an issue.

[CTown]

We already have Zen3 + Vega 7/8. It is called Cezanne. What is this new chip actually?

I know how you feel. I mean Vega still works but I never thought we would still see it after it got forked off into two directions two generations ago (since CDNA 2 will be released next year).

[skeevy420]

I know how you feel. I mean Vega still works but I never thought we would still see it after it got forked off into two directions two generations ago (since CDNA 2 will be released next year).

I think their plan is to dump Vega into DDR4 chips and save RDNA2 for DRR5 and better.

[Adarion]

As much as I like to read that, but: Does anybody else wonder if this will ever end up in a real-world machine that one can buy? Or at least but and then flash it with Libre/Coreboot?

I've often seen "theoretical" support for AMD's chips, but it hardly ever ended up supporting real-world mainboards. Ancient ones, that were hard to come by. Or CPUs were no longer supported in current Coreboot. Or it was just developer boards. Or very maybe Google's Chromebook related stuff.
But I'd really like to slap some APU into any MSI/ASus/ASRock/Gigabyte/ECS/Jetway/Biostar/...whatever board and have fun.

(And while we're at it better firmware and drivers for USB 3.x chips. They suck, esp. after S2RAM.)

[ezekrb5]

are you telling me that it is possible to buy new pc that support coreboot ?

Remember that coreboot itself doesn't imply you get all the source code... Currently all modern intel coreboot cpus need binary blobs to run, provided by intel themselves, with no source code at all for the binaries and an enabled management engine with full permissions.