Recommendations for development platforms for the ASPEED AST2500 & AST2600?

[Bruce Mitchell]

Hello Andrew,

> Hi Bruce
> 
> On Wed, 16 Oct 2019, at 05:14, Bruce Mitchell wrote:
> >  
> > Hello,
> > 
> > 
> > I am Bruce Mitchell and I work for Phoenix Technologies Ltd. as a BMC 
> > firmware Engineer.
> > 
> > Phoenix Technologies Ltd. is developing an OpenBMC 
> > (https://www.openbmc.org/ , not the Facebook flavor) product.
> 
> FYI, the projects have united (and the result lives under the Linux Foundation).

It seems the people at American Portwell Technology do not actually know that
When I enquired about their Neptune Alpha OpenBMC development kit
https://portwell.com/solutions/openBMC.php

> > 
> > Our intent is also to be a valuable contributing member to the OpenBMC project.
> 
> Great! Looking forward to your contributions.
> 
> > 
> > 
> > We will be initially developing for the ASPEED Technology Inc. AST2500 
> > followed by the AST2600 BMC SoC.
> > 
> > Do you have any suggestion of available hardware development platforms 
> > for the ASPEED AST2500 & AST2600?
> 
> Unfortunately there isn't anything that is both cheap and easy to acquire that I'm aware of. Hopefully others can chime in if they know things that I don't, but this is an issue that's cropped up in the past and hasn't been resolved.
> 
> I think the cheapest anyone has found was a system (motherboard, cheap x86-64 CPU and RAM) that was about $800AU, but I'd have to dig out the details on what that was exactly (and it may have been AST2400-based).

Easily affordable is desirable, but easy to acquire is of more importance presently.

> 
> Sorry I don't have better answers.
> 
> Andrew

Thank you.

--
Bruce