Purism Announces New Laptops Based On 7th Gen Intel CPUs, 4K Option

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism Announces New Laptops Based On 7th Gen Intel CPUs, 4K Option

While Purism remains very busy with their Librem 5 smartphone efforts, today they have announced their fourth version of the Librem 13/15 laptops...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Purism-New-7th-Gen-4K-Laptops

[shmerl]

Still no AMD options though?

[Venemo]

That is kind of disappointing. If they can't bother with the 8th gen, they could've at least waited for Icelake then or something.

[tg--]

Still no AMD options though?

Of course not, the whole point is to use free firmware.
There is no free firmware available for modern AMD systems, they all require a proprietary EFI/BIOS from one of the usual vendors, without exception.

[shmerl]

Of course not, the whole point is to use free firmware.
There is no free firmware available for modern AMD systems, they all require a proprietary EFI/BIOS from one of the usual vendors, without exception.

No AMD boards work with coreboot? That's weird.

[tg--]

That is kind of disappointing. If they can't bother with the 8th gen, they could've at least waited for Icelake then or something.

I don't see how that's disappointing.
The point of the purism systems is to use as much free software as possible, and as little blobs as possible.
So they are offering what they can (and working hard on bringing free firmware to modern systems), which for now is Intels "7th" generation Core processors.

So no, they "can't bother" with 8th gen, because they haven't managed to support that hardware platform - nobody else has as well.

If you can't bother about free firmware, the Purism hardware certainly is not for you and you should just buy a machine from one of the large commercial vendors (say Lenovo or Dell), which will never bother to sell you free firmware, but certainly will sell you Intels latest offers.

[tg--]

No AMD boards work with coreboot? That's weird.

None produced since 2010.

Edit:
I'll have to amend that: none since 2010 that aren't specialized embedded systems for large customers demanding Coreboot.
None for server boards and consumer boards.

[shmerl]

None produced since 2010.

Is AMD blocking it somehow, or what the problem is in general?

[Vistaus]

No AMD boards work with coreboot? That's weird.

Yeah, very weird given the fact that AMD is seen as "The Holy Grail" (aside from RISC-V) by a lot of FOSS users.

[tg--]

Is AMD blocking it somehow, or what the problem is in general?

About a decade ago, many AMD systems were supported by Coreboot.
So much so, that many corporate customers demanded Coreboot support for AMDs offers, especially the embedded Geode platform.

Then they started to shift their platform initialization code into a new binary package, called AGESA; which is somewhat comparable to Intels FSP, but to my knowledge includes even more code.
In 2011, they subcontracted actual Coreboot development in order to have all of their systems supported by Coreboot. They decided to base that on AGESA, so Coreboot included little actual initialization code and relied largely on bootstrapping AGESA.
Then in 2014, AMD decided they no longer cared about Coreboot, they had moved on to UEFI and this was good enough for their embedded customers.
So they simply stopped releasing public AGESA blobs, fired their subcontractor (which had to lay off a lot of staff), and since then, no AMD system has been supported by Coreboot.