openSFI Is A Very Interesting Collaboration Between AMD & Intel For Better Firmware Unification
An interesting technical collaboration between AMD and Intel as well as other industry players like Google, Bytedance, Microsoft, MiTAC, HPE, and others is openSFI. The new openSFI "Open Silicon Firmware Interface" project is aiming to work toward vendor-neutral low-level firmware interfaces for more interoperable firmware solutions across vendors.
The openSFI project was previously announced at the Open Compute Project summit and has been heavily in the works for several months now but happened to slide under my radar until digging through the technical content from this week's OCP Global Summit 2025. OpenSFI hopes to become an open, architecture-neutral interface for standardizing how the host fiemware interfaces with CPU silicon initialization and run-time logic across hardware vendors.
The openSFI project is complementary to AMD's exciting and ongoing openSIL effort for becoming a replacement to AGESA for low-level CPU silicon initialization. The openSFI unified abstraction would in effect sit atop AMD openSIL and Intel FSP.
Last month the openSFI 0.3 specification was published (PDF) by the Open Compute Project. Voting members included 3mdeb, 9elements, AMD, AMI, ARM, ByteDance, Google, HPE, Insyde, Intel, Microsoft, MiTAC, and OSFF. The v0.3 specification contains two graphics for showing the current and future stacks for how openSFI could fit into the firmware equation:
And with openSFI in the stack for unified open-source silicon firmware initialization:
The specification further describes openSFI as:
Very interesting and here's to hoping for the best with openSFI and its adoption moving forward.
Above is an openSFI presentation from the earlier OCP EMEA summit with more background on this initiative.
The openSFI project was previously announced at the Open Compute Project summit and has been heavily in the works for several months now but happened to slide under my radar until digging through the technical content from this week's OCP Global Summit 2025. OpenSFI hopes to become an open, architecture-neutral interface for standardizing how the host fiemware interfaces with CPU silicon initialization and run-time logic across hardware vendors.
The openSFI project is complementary to AMD's exciting and ongoing openSIL effort for becoming a replacement to AGESA for low-level CPU silicon initialization. The openSFI unified abstraction would in effect sit atop AMD openSIL and Intel FSP.
Last month the openSFI 0.3 specification was published (PDF) by the Open Compute Project. Voting members included 3mdeb, 9elements, AMD, AMI, ARM, ByteDance, Google, HPE, Insyde, Intel, Microsoft, MiTAC, and OSFF. The v0.3 specification contains two graphics for showing the current and future stacks for how openSFI could fit into the firmware equation:
And with openSFI in the stack for unified open-source silicon firmware initialization:
The specification further describes openSFI as:
"The Open Silicon Firmware Interface (openSFI) is a specification that defines a common, architecture-neutral interface for host firmware to interact with silicon initialization firmware. Its goal is to enable modular, scalable, and vendor-agnostic integration of silicon into host firmware environments.
openSFI Specification is the Foundational Contract. Host firmware doesn’t care how the silicon initialization is implemented. It just needs a clean, stable API contract to call the right function, with the right inputs, and get deterministic outputs.
...
The primary goals of the openSFI are to:
- Unify silicon initialization interfaces across vendors.
- Simplify host firmware integration.
- Enable reuse of host firmware across platforms and vendors.
- Reduce engineering cost, duplication, and validation overhead.
- Promote sustainability through efficient resource usage and common tooling."
Very interesting and here's to hoping for the best with openSFI and its adoption moving forward.
Above is an openSFI presentation from the earlier OCP EMEA summit with more background on this initiative.