| Semi-hijacking your question to mention the other side of the pond too, which many people do not seem to know about and I run into this issue quite regularly. While the laptop situation is indeed pretty bad (the X200 is probably as best as you can get here), for people looking for a modern workstation, AMD's current FX processor lineup is still free from this trash. Past the 2013 designs (Family 16h [1]) AMD includes their own equivalent of Intel's ME called PSP [2], so presumably the upcoming Zen is going to be heavily backdoored too. Now, you can still buy an 8-core/4 GHz+ AMD Vishera [3] generation (which is the "current" FX), add a motherboard with ECC support (in a stark contrast to Intel, all AMD FX processors fully support ECC memory and for example ASUS sells a number of AMD motherboards with ECC support) and build yourself a workstation that will easily last for another decade, possibly longer (you can always buy a motherboard or two of your favourite model as a backup for the times when they finally disappear from the market). All FX processors are factory unlocked [4] and can be pushed much farther past their design specs with decent cooling, adding another bit to their possible usefulness over the long term. Some more (random) reading on the subject of avoiding AMD PSP and Intel ME: http://hollaforums.com/thread/557954/technology/uncorrectabl... - [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_CPU_microarchitect... [2] - https://libreboot.org/faq/#amd [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_FX_microprocessors... [4] - http://www.techpowerup.com/153445/amd-unlocked-fx-processors... |