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

[John Keates]

(I cut out the large amount of text to prevent the mail length from growing to the extreme)

Basically, if money and time were no issue, you had one real blocking issue preventing you from just buying an Intel CPU and building a system around it: legal reasons.
Intel does not give anyone the information needed to completely build a comparable platform around one of their CPUs.  Perhaps you could (since you could have infinite money) buy Intel or a controlling part of Intel to influence this, but that’s about it.
Another thing locked by legalese documents would be people that have the skills and experience to do this. There aren’t a lot of them and almost all of them work at Intel. 

The x86 platform is not just about some registers, some PCB design and some code, if that was all there was to it, anyone could build something with the right information. There is deep knowledge and insight at the implementation level of the silicon and microcode (and bootrom!) required to build something around an Intel CPU from scratch. Some legal measures prevent people at Intel from working at a comparable job in a competitive manner. At the same time, those people might have status or perks in a non-monetary fashion that you cannot give them. Short of stealing people, you may simply not have a way to get access to the people required to build anything.

So, would it technically be possible to build something from scratch based on a Intel CPU? Yes. But it is not feasible. Not even with 1000 people and a billion dollars. Perhaps with 100k people and 100 billion dollars.

Regards,
John

> On 4 Sep 2018, at 18:16, Peter Stuge <peter at stuge.se> wrote:
> 
> [ …]

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