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Re:PowerPC Notebook Block Diagram by userbinator on Sunday November 12, 2017 @11:29AM (#15681347)
or the hundreds of ARM manufacturers that take a more passive route of not caring about user freedom?

I think ARM SoCs are even worse. Try finding a full (or just partial) datasheet/technical documentation for anything like the ones used in recent smartphones and tablets, for example. They are going to want a NDA. The only ones publicly available were leaked. They also differ significantly between each other and often even within the same model line, so it's nothing like a PC where a lot of things still remain relatively standard.

ARM also has TrustZone, their DRM technology of which there is almost no public documentation.

Re:PowerPC Notebook Block Diagram by sweden on Sunday November 12, 2017 @12:34PM (#15681632)
TrustZone is not DRM nor a management engine like Intel's ME. It is just a reference design in order to implement some sort of sandbox and security zone in the SoC.

ARM doesn't mandate how TrustZone is used, it just provides the technology. If SoC designers use it to force DRM into their products, it's not really ARM's fault.

Also, just to make it clear, it is not ARM's fault if ARM based SoCs lack proper documentation.

Re:PowerPC Notebook Block Diagram by subway on Sunday November 12, 2017 @05:08PM (#15682890)
It's at least partially ARM's fault, as ARM doesn't publish documentation for their cores. SoC vendors are just as bad, if not worse, but ARM doesn't get off scott-free.
Re:PowerPC Notebook Block Diagram by pm215 on Sunday November 12, 2017 @05:48PM (#15683003)
Eh? Here's the TRM for the Cortex-A57, to pick the first arm core I thought of: https://developer.arm.com/docs/ddi0488/c/preface The architecture manuals are also downloadable.
Re:PowerPC Notebook Block Diagram by subway on Monday November 13, 2017 @12:53AM (#15684576)
And Mali?
Re:PowerPC Notebook Block Diagram by andreiw on Sunday November 12, 2017 @01:14PM (#15681826)
Actually, the Arm server space is solving this problem through standardization. These are the SBSA and SBBR specs. All systems from different vendors will look the same way to the OS and boot thr same way as x86 servers. You will be able to run the same binary OS distribution on any system. Gone are the days of a BSP for every SoC. And these server specs will drive how non-server systems will look, since there will be an inherent cost to do something different (both in hw, sw and firmware).
Re:PowerPC Notebook Block Diagram by gumby on Monday November 13, 2017 @10:24AM (#15687068)
> I think ARM SoCs are even worse. Try finding a full (or just partial) datasheet/technical documentation for anything like the ones used in recent smartphones and tablets, for example. They are going to want a NDA.

If you're thinking of someone like MediaTek, Allwinner or the like: they aren't really in the merchant chip business. They pretty much design a chip for a single large project and supply it with support chips, (usually crummy) drivers, and even a linux or android port as a "complete unit". Often there isn't really a data sheet as such; they send some engineers along to help with integration.

This, by the way, was the original meaning of "SoC" when people were starting to think of common hardware/software codesign in the 1990s: a purpose-built chip for a specific design built out of a combination of standard IP and custom circuitry, but conventionally fabbed instead of being FPGA. Think of it as integration of some of the board design onto a single die. The IP market people thought at the time would eventually develop didn't really, though.

Intel and AMD are still in the good‡ old days of data sheets, second sourcing (pretty much dead but it's still in those companies' DNA) etc.

‡ and they were good times IMHO.

Re:PowerPC Notebook Block Diagram by newusertoday on Sunday November 12, 2017 @02:26PM (#15682161)
public implementation link https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-trusted-firmware. its software running in privileged cpu mode.