Intel Quietly Released A Redistributable, Lightweight ME "Ignition Firmware" Binary

[madscientist159]

You're seriously living in a conspiracy theorist fantasy world there.

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OpenPOWER, has potential but it's expensive, power hungry, and on the desktop it's pretty much a dead end without a reliably working web browser.

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Client side Windows not relevant any more? 95%+ of the desktop market isn't relevant with a valuation in the tens of billions? What rock are you living under?? Just because your high school friends are carrying around mobile phones for everything doesn't mean that nearly everyone else in the world doesn't use Windows them to get their daily work done.

I think these snippets of your post speak volumes about you and your credibility, not to mention the likely projection issues in your first sentence.

For what it's worth, I'm typing this post from an OpenPOWER desktop system, and it's using less power than my old Opteron box I was using before to avoid the ME/PSP. Can't even really remember high school well at this point -- not sure where that insult came from -- and I can assure you many of the organizations that have selected POWER, and our OpenPOWER systems, do in fact very much care and no, they don't do their work on mobile phones. You might even have heard of some of them, but I'm not going to say who they are since it's not my place to do so.

Don't confuse what you see in front of you -- including Microsoft's entertainment-driven revenue -- with what is slowly changing in the enterprise space. By the time you see the change at your level, it will be completely unstoppable.

[starshipeleven]

Would this allow for coreboot on newer machines with partially neutered ME, kind of like what me_cleaner can do for older CPUs?

Yes, but it does not solve the main issue of coreboot on newer machines, lack of documentation that makes development really hard or impossible and mostly blob-reliant board init through FSP blob.

[starshipeleven]

Intel sucks, Nvidia sucks, AMD sucks...

Life sucks, deal with it

[timofonic]

Life sucks, deal with it

I do it! It's just a personal reminder

[nils_]

That place from the beer picture looks like the Delirium Village?

[tsundoku]

OpenPOWER, has potential but it's expensive, power hungry, and on the desktop it's pretty much a dead end without a reliably working web browser. Fixable? Certainly, but few are going to spend 5x the $ on a CPU that's not performing with a comparable increase in performance without a HUGE incentive to do so.

For full disclosure, I have been running a system based on a Talos II (one of Raptor's OpenPOWER motherboards) for about five months. I won't insert myself into the security argument, but these criticisms of OpenPOWER's general viability don't match with my own experience and I have to wonder what the basis for them is.

• Expensive - this is subjective, but OpenPOWER isn't that far off in pricing from comparable x86 systems. The x86 equivalent of a Talos II is a dual-socket Xeon workstation board, which is more computer for more money than most people want or need. The Blackbird is a tougher comparison because I have not seen something like it in the x86 world, although I have not been looking either. The fact that OpenPOWER systems are not available in a price/spec tier comparable to, say, a more pedestrian $1000 PC may be a barrier to entry, but the products on offer are not unreasonably priced for what they actually are. Where does the "5x" figure come from? What is the reference x86 machine that costs 20% as much with comparable specs?
• Power hungry - the single-socket Intel board I swapped out for the Talos II tends to idle around 100W, and the Talos II idles between 150W-200W, but it has a whole extra CPU and twice as many DIMMs riding on it. I'm not seeing evidence that OpenPOWER is particularly hungry here.
• Reliably working web browser - I have been doing all of my web browsing at home from the current Firefox release on this machine since I built it. Chromium is also available, I hear, but I cannot speak for it as I do not care for it and don't use it. On what grounds do you say there is no reliably working web browser for OpenPOWER?

Obviously OpenPOWER offerings are niche products that most people are never going to hear of and that require some sort of motivation to get into. It is very early to be making calls about the long-term prospects for the platform considering that actual shipping products have not been available for that long and the market is probably mostly enthusiasts and early adopters. People who just want "a computer" are not going to be buying these things, but I moved over to mine from x86 without any trouble and I don't think the sort of person who is aware enough of OpenPOWER to be discussing it on a forum like this should have anything to be afraid of.

[mearon]

Just one more data point, I own a Blackbird from RaptorCS with an 8-core (32 threads), equipped with 2x 32 GB DDR4 ECC DIMMs, and it idles at 54 W at the wall. Since power consumption is a concern to me, I did some thorough measurements, which I have posted here: https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Black...gy_consumption
Later on I added a GPU (AMD WX 3200), which adds another 10 W when idle (one FHD monitor connected via DP). Though it could be less, personally I'm okay with 64 W idle power consumption