[coreboot] Intel ME what is it? And when did this dangerous thing get installed?

[John Keates]

> On 3 Sep 2018, at 11:54, Philipp Stanner <stanner at posteo.de> wrote:
> 
> Am Mittwoch, den 29.08.2018, 04:09 -0400 schrieb Youness Alaoui:
>> If there are more specific questions that you have, ask them and I
>> might be able to answer them!
> 
> I might have one: What does stop a motherboard-vendor from just buying
> a CPU and implementing it? Which chips, beside the CPU, do you need
> from Intel in any case to make the machine work?

As usual, it boils down to money. You also need data from Intel to make a CPU work (microcode, FSP).
Creating a chipset, making RAM work etc. can easily cost you hundreds of millions. On top of that, it’s hard to make money off of it, making it double-bad from a capitalistic-commercial perspective.
There is a reason you don’t get to choose a chipset anymore; Nvidia and VIA (and others) once were in the business of making chipsets, but not any more.


> I always thought of the CPU just as a machine executing code, and
> assumed it's possible to use it just as any microcontroller: You can
> add the ME-Chipset, but you don't have to.
> 

Well, yes and no. There are plenty of CPU models out there that require specific Intel code to work, some of them cryptographically locking anyone else out.
End-users don’t care, and technical users don’t have enough power to do anything about it on the Intel side of things.

> Philipp
> 
> 
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Regards,
John