As I say I have no great affection for UEFI. Internally the code is pretty awful. But if you want a standard that works the same across x86 and ARM servers and exists already on those servers, then it's UEFI (I'm aware you can run u-boot on x86, but next to no one actually does that).
BTW UEFI is fully open source as of a few months ago after Microsoft relicensed the FAT driver. So we're just comparing two free software projects with different takes on the booting problem.
U-boot is ported and regularly run on the MinnowBoard with an Intel Atom.
Do you speak about tianocore? I don't have much experience with it, can you configure it as well as u-boot and just compile in stuff you need?
Update: If you didn't know, u-boot supports signed images too. So UEFI is not necessary for this.
So UEFI can to the same as a much smaller u-boot?