A modern PC is quite different from the 1980s original, and while the BIOS still lingers after 30 years it must now solve many tricky problems. When the original PC with it's pre-ISA expansion bus was powered on, it was almost immediately ready to run an application. Today's PC can have several multicore CPUs interconnected by HyperTransport, Front Side Bus or QuickPath, DDR3 RAM on each CPU, and a large number of buses and peripherals. Many components require increasingly complex initialization to be implemented in software. This talk describes the technical challenges encountered by coreboot developers and their solutions.