Intel Bay Trail Atom Support Comes To Coreboot

Intel's exciting "Bay Trail" Atom platform is now supported by Coreboot! This is great news since this Atom SoC is exciting for its use of in-house HD Graphics and also since this signals a Bay Trail Chromebook coming soon.

In several Git commits to mainline Coreboot on Friday, Aaron Durbin of Google's Chrome/Chromium team implemented Intel Bay Trail support for both the mobile and desktop processors. Durbin wrote on Friday in a Git commit, "The initial Bay Trail code is intended to support the mobile and desktop version of Bay Trail. This support can train memory and execute through ramstage." Several more commits followed up on the Bay Trail Coreboot support.

There's long been talk of a Bay Trail Chromebook out of Google but now with their developers shoving this Atom SoC support into the Coreboot project that they control, it will likely come soon, just as has been the case with other Chromebooks that rely upon this open-source "BIOS" implementation.

Intel Bay Trail is exciting since it further improves Atom's performance in the low-power space and since they ditched PowerVR graphics for in-house IvyBridge-derived HD Graphics. We've been excited for Bay Trail for months and were the first to report on its graphics capabilities back when it was known as Valley View.

Sadly we haven't been able to deliver any Bay Trail Linux benchmarks yet since the first round of Bay Trail tablets/laptops have been garbage. With the forthcoming Bay Trail Chromebook this will hopefully change and recently announced was the Bay Trail DN2820FYK NUC kit. Once I'm able to find the DN2820FYK NUC at Amazon/NewEgg, I'll pick it up and hopefully run a plethora of Linux benchmarks on this exciting low-power Intel SoC.