Details
The HECI bus allows the Host OS to communicate directly with the Manageability Engine (ME) integrated in the chipset. This bi-directional, variable data-rate bus enables the Host and ME to communicate system management information and events in a standards-compliant way, essentially replacing the System Management Bus (SMBus). The bus consists of four wires: a request and grant pair along with a serial transmit and receive data pair.
Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have historically provided active management technologies through the use of proprietary on-board controllers, such as Baseboard Management Controllers. These solutions typically suffer two main disadvantages due to their proprietary nature. High BOM costs are usually incurred due to need for additional components and routing. High PLC costs are incurred due to the non-standard implementation, which increases software and hardware design and validation costs while remaining relatively inflexible to future changes. On the other hand, the inflexibility is even greater with HECI due to coupling HECI with a chipset, and having to redevelop HECI software for each different chipset as opposed to one common BMC software for multiple chipsets.
HECI and the previously used SMBus have the following aspects in common: the Host OS is able to control system management devices such as: on-board fan controllers, remote wake devices such as Wake-on-LAN, power supply devices such as Smart Battery Data. Builtin HECI functionality and 3rd-party management cards can allow the Host OS to directly initiate management events (such as remote wake, or, out-of-band throttling to decrease thermal and power profile) in case HECI is supported by the running OS. Example devices are network cards and graphics cards. Besides that, both HECI and other ME technologies are chipset/ME vendor-specific.
Read more about this topic: Host Embedded Controller Interface
Famous quotes containing the word details:
“If my sons are to become the kind of men our daughters would be pleased to live among, attention to domestic details is critical. The hostilities that arise over housework...are crushing the daughters of my generation....Change takes time, but men’s continued obliviousness to home responsibilities is causing women everywhere to expire of trivialities.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request. One must seem to hear the unreasonable demands of the petulant, unmoved, and the tedious details of the dull, untired. That is the least price that a man must pay for a high station.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)