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Hugo Landau has written a blog post about why Intel will never let hardware owners control the Management Engine. The Intel Managment Engine (ME) is a secondary microprocessor ensconced in recent Intel x86 chips, running an Intel-signed, proprietary, binary blob which provides remote access over the network as well as direct access to memory and peripherals. Because of the code signing restrictions enforced by the hardware, it cannot be modified or replaced by the user.
Intel/AMD will never allow machine owners to control the code executing on the ME/PSP because they have decided to build a business on preventing you from doing so. In particular, it's likely that they're actually contractually obligated not to let you control these processors.
The reason is that Intel literally decided to collude with Hollywood to integrate DRM into their CPUs; they conspired with media companies to lock you out of certain parts of your machine. After all, this is the company that created HDCP.
This DRM functionality is implemented on the ME/PSP. Its ability to implement DRM depends on you not having control over it, and not having control over the code that runs on it. Allowing you to control the code running on the ME would directly compromise an initiative which Intel has been advancing for over a decade.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday July 23 2018, @11:39PM (1 child)
... and Microsoft is still a highly profitable company.
They know they might lose the geeks on this one in the short-term, but they figure they can make more money from the payoffs from the MPAA / RIAA (and presumably also the NSA). And then their fairly small number of competitors will realize the cash cow that Intel has found, and put the same misfeature in their CPUs for the right price. You might have access to open source CPU designs, but you won't have access to the fabrication facilities needed to actually make a CPU based on those designs, and if you do you will have little guarantee that said facility doesn't put these kinds of misfeatures into your theoretically clean CPUs.
In short, you're screwed, and Intel knows it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 24 2018, @05:31PM
Not really.
Microsoft can be profitable. Intel can be profitable. AMD can be profitable.
But that doesn't mean that they aren't fostering a countermovement that renders them increasingly irrelevant.
They can make a fat profit all this time, doing widgets and gadgets like embedded video players and games consoles and tablets, while people who want to do real work use other equipment. As the utility difference between the Intel and the freer options grows, the tension grows in the market.
It's not a binary situation.