Coreboot 4.11 Brings Many Intel Improvements, New Support For Supermicro / Lenovo Boards

[michaelb1]

Think again. With the ME/PSP you still have that low level backdoor access, and the FSP for Intel (AGESA for AMD) is as good a place as any to put a key extraction routine.

Don't like it? Don't use Intel or AMD systems. coreboot doesn't (and can't) give you the security level you listed above on any x86 platform post 2013 or so.

AMD PSP got added much later than Intel ME: I was able to find some 2014-2015 and even 2016 AMD CPUs without this backdoor. It really depends on the architecture: early 16h Jaguar and older - no PSP; while the late 16h Puma and 17h Picasso (Ryzen) - with PSP

[madscientist159]

AMD PSP got added much later than Intel ME: I was able to find some 2014-2015 and even 2016 AMD CPUs without this backdoor. It really depends on the architecture: early 16h Jaguar and older - no PSP; while the late 16h Puma and 17h Picasso (Ryzen) - with PSP

Fair enough. I tend to overlook those parts as uninteresting because the core architecture is so old; those are definitely not workstation/server grade parts, they're basically desktop only with extremely poor performance compared to modern desktop parts. Essentially it wasn't worth the investment for AMD to add the PSP vs. just fabbing those old cores as-is, which should say something about how AMD positioned them on the market (low end / cheap).

And yes, at this point I consider the Opterons uninteresting except for historical reasons. The world has moved on; x86 has dead ended for secure applications and great alternatives have sprung up to fill the gap. Retrocomputing is great for preserving history, less so for real world work.