Seems to me that the "CMOS" battery for real-time clock and for storage of settings is an unnecessary part of the BOM on computers.
After all, it would be relatively trivial to write UEFI code to retrieve time from the Internet from various public clock servers. Or even use-configurable ones. And "CMOS" settings could be stored in persistent "flash" ROM instead of in NVRAM.
So why does every "x86" PC built these days still include a CR2032 cell and the RTC circuitry? With system longevity growing all the time, there's bound to be a lot of unnecessary service calls relating to this fundamental vulnerability in the platform. Especially for embedded platforms.
I know the RTC has been a fixture of the PC world since the time of the original IBM PC AT (the PC XT didn't have a RTC, as I remember being forced to enter the time/date every time I booted one up in the mid 1980s!!). But is the battery backed RTC a concept that should have been buried years ago? I think so personally. Or at least engineered to be optional, so that a missing/dead battery doesn't generate a failure/service call. Nor condemn the user to a ridiculous "zero date".
After all, it would be relatively trivial to write UEFI code to retrieve time from the Internet from various public clock servers. Or even use-configurable ones. And "CMOS" settings could be stored in persistent "flash" ROM instead of in NVRAM.
So why does every "x86" PC built these days still include a CR2032 cell and the RTC circuitry? With system longevity growing all the time, there's bound to be a lot of unnecessary service calls relating to this fundamental vulnerability in the platform. Especially for embedded platforms.
I know the RTC has been a fixture of the PC world since the time of the original IBM PC AT (the PC XT didn't have a RTC, as I remember being forced to enter the time/date every time I booted one up in the mid 1980s!!). But is the battery backed RTC a concept that should have been buried years ago? I think so personally. Or at least engineered to be optional, so that a missing/dead battery doesn't generate a failure/service call. Nor condemn the user to a ridiculous "zero date".
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