[frequent]

re Alibaba: We're aware of the Alibaba CPU and are following it. It is indeed very interesting. But we also visited one of the factories where their servers are produced. Everything is secret and there seems to be no open-source culture, so we don't have much hope. We tried working with OpenPower servers, but when testing with real workloads, they were ~4x slower than x86 or ARM.

re Secure Boot: We use secure boot / TPM only in Capri servers and it causes of lot of work with suppliers. We are working on a drakut uefi boot with secure boot and are slowly sloving BIOS issues. Linuxboot bios is used on some servers, but it's not maintained and no secure boot, plus the information from Intel to maintain linuxboot is secret with NDA. In general, securing the boot process requires hopping piggyback on larger companies with the same issues and the bargaining power to speak with AMD or Intel, because NDAs are a dead end and without bargaining power, your mileage is short.

If you're interested to discuss in more detail, send me an email and I'll connect you with my boss who knows a lot more.