Self-Boot Engine
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Self-Boot Engine (SBE): Refers to a small auxillary Power ISA microprocessor present on POWER8 and POWER9 CPU packages. The SBE is the first processor that runs when the CPU is powered up and is responsible for initializing the chip so that the main cores themselves can run. The SBE firmware is stored in a SEEPROM on the CPU module itself and executes out of a small dedicated SRAM (PIBMEM). The term is also used interchangeably to refer to the SBE firmware as well as the SBE. The final act of the SBE is to start Hostboot running on one of the cores.
The SBE firmware is open source.
