AMD Reveals Latest Plans For Open-Source openSIL With Replacing AGESA, Zen 6 Milestone

[bernstein]

tl;dr It enables devs to make the firmware running on the x86 parts completely open-source.

the primary driver behind this is, battling for performance-per-watt supremacy or selling cheaper are no longer the only factors in selling silicon.
big customers are willing to pay for control of (parts of) the firmware stack. So, if they keep roughly competitive in perf-per-watt, it will give them an advantage in datacenters and other big corporate customers.

Obviously open-sourcing x86 firmware & gpu-drivers nowadays isn't as open as doing that 10 or 20 years ago. Much moved to gpu/cpu-psp firmware. Nevertheless this is infinitely better than what we've ever had.

IMHO initially a huge part into this was valve. sure amd would have loved to be in the nintendo switch 2, but that was always a longshot. selling ~4 million steam deck apu's may pale in comparison to 140 million switches or 61 million ps5's. But selling ~8 million dGPUs & ~45million laptop cpus in the same timeframe (as the deck) just shows how important valve as a single customer is for amd. it's equivalent to selling half of their dgpus or 10% of their apus to a single customer...

with ai gpus now selling like hotcakes & their margins being crazy, things obvioulsy look a bit different.
still, since amd is trailing nvidia here, they will have to lean heavily on that openness to compete, so i dob't much has changed.