DDR4_controller Alternatives

DDR4_controller reviews and mentions

• TinyBIOS – A minimalist open-source BIOS project for fun
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Nov 2022

  >The main task for any BIOS is to initialize the memory controller, which for modern DDR4 or DDR5 memory is a very complex and undocumented task, so it must be done usually by a binary firmware blob provided by Intel or AMD.

  I don't question that binary blobs are distributed by Intel or AMD.

  I also don't question that DDR5 memory is probably more complex (since it is newer, and newer technology is usually more complex) than DDR4, which is probably more complex than DDR3, etc.

  But, on a purely conceptual level, RAM is not all that complex... It's ridiculously simple. On a conceptual level, RAM is just a bunch of wires where most of those wires determine the address, some of those wires are for power, clock signal and ground, and some other of those wires move data back and forth to the CPU. Not complex at all!

  The memory controller needs to be initialized? Well, maybe on startup it needs to be quickly calibrated/tested to make sure that a given RAM will work at a given frequency, but again, not rocket science!

  Somone doesn't like Intel or AMD black-box binary blobs?

  Well, people have (and I'm guessing more will, over time!) implemented their own memory controllers running on FPGA's (perhaps not DDR5 yet -- but the future is ripe with possibilities!)

  Some of them even are up to DDR4 capabilities...

  https://github.com/oprecomp/DDR4_controller

  https://www.google.com/search?q=open+source+ddr4+ip+core

  But I'll let your statement "DDR5 memory is a very complex and undocumented task, so it must be done usually by a binary firmware blob provided by Intel or AMD." stand for now.

  Yes, that's true as of 2022...

  But will that continue to remain true?

  ?

• System-Verilog Code for DDR4 Memory Controller with Xilinx Phy (2021)
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Aug 2022