[winter_blue]

Yea, that was disappointing indeed. After reading the first several paragraphs, I was hoping that the answer would be get an AMD processor instead of Intel , but nope.

I hope that in the future some manufacturer(s) start making fully open source verifiably secure RISC-V (or ARM) processors, and that we have a migration over to that.

[erk__]

Another candidate for this is OpenPOWER

[moonchild]

OpenPOWER/POWER9.

[numpad0]

Feel free to call it a conspiracy theory, but I firmly believe the IME/PSP is an operation by one of those three letters.

Intel Management Engine is abbreviated as IME, and AMD Platform Security Processor is abbreviated as PSP. Those are each same abbreviation as Input Method Editor, a mandatory keyboard input layer for East Asian languages, and PlayStation Portable, Sony’s game console which cryptographic security is famously hacked, by the way.

That can’t be coincidence. Those are names intentionally chosen to make technical information hard to search for.

So a “clean” CPU can only be built outside of sphere of influence of whichever agency managing IME/PSP, and of course has to be free from its Red counterparts as well. I don’t think that will happen naturally.

[mqus]

Ok, I'll bite. I call it(the chosen names) a conspiracy theory. I'll explain.

Search for "intel me" or "amd psp" or "ime psp" and you will find what you're looking for. If you're reading about it or hearing about it you will most likely also know the brand or the company behind it. If you're searching for psp and only find Sony stuff then of course you will repeat your query with more context. Is that not the first thing you will learn when you google something?

More importantly, they could have chosen much better words/abbreviations for not being "googleable". But they didn't because the IME/PSP is also something they sell to enterprise customers and very openly so.

Don't get me wrong. I'm still skeptical if those features are needed on consumer hardware and of the intentions behind it but the name being intentionally hard to search for is not something I'm worried about.

[majewsky]

Show me any three-letter acronym that doesn't have multiple meanings already attached to it.

[numpad0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_TLA_disambig... BEZ, CJK, DXF, IEQ, IXH, JGZ, QFP, QTH, SJX, SXA, XPX, XVF and some more.

[notwedtm]

> That can't be coincidence

Yes it can.

[fakename11]

This is conspiracy theory level stuff