[timonovici]

I'm a software engineer myself - but I can't even contribute to projects such as lowRISC - is way beyond my abilities. Right now I'm learning to program microcontrollers, and I want to learn about FPGA's as the next step.

I also work at a company that has exactly this focus - to sell, and eventually produce devices that can be run with free software from top to bottom - but I don't see ourselves producing our own devices in the next 5 years, even if we would become wildly sucessful.

The hope seems to lie with ARM for the moment - C100 / C201 have even the Embedded Controller (EC) code avaiable - but they do have plans to implement something simillar to ME, AFAIK.

[trome]

Yeah, I'm not advocating for building our own SoC, as just taping out a chip is tens of millions, instead I'm advocating for using inexpensive Arm64 chips that already are a known quantity (firmware free, mainlined drivers) to build a fast & secure network, and scale from there.