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by Crosseye_Jack 2649 days ago
(at least on intel, I’ve no looked into it on AMD’s side) Intel ME can be neutered. On newer gen’s doing so can be as simple as setting of a single flag. On older systems you can rip so much of it out that all it can do is bring up the CPU.

I would say you can still be concerned by IntelME (as it has been shown to be exploitable) but still purchase Intel/AMD. I mean who else you going to purchase from if you want an affordable x86 system?

ARM is getting more mainstream (in the laptop/desktop/server world.) and we now have fairly decently powerfully desktop/laptop arm powered machines we could actually dev on but the ARM world is still filled with binary blobs needed to get the cpu started.

Power9 has a ton of open source but the CPU’s are not. RISC-V is promising but still pricey as hell atm.

Just saying, you can be worried about ME but in a place where you are stuck with it.