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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Let's hope one of the other CPU manufacturers (e.g. AMD) starts supporting LibreBoot and allows to officially disable the ME-equivalent hardware feature, so that Intel get's forced by market-pressur to follow.

Intel needs more competition - thanks to AMD latest new 8-core CPU Intel got forced to release a new CPU the had in their basement for years - suddently it's possible for them to release i7 notebook CPUs with more then two cores!! Even back in 2010 it would have been viable to produce 4 core notebook CPUs - but the went away because the had no competition.

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That was the top request in their March AMA:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...

I wouldn't hold my breath, though.

The sad thing with that is that

- releasing the source doesn't tell you what's on the chip.

- PSP is kind of "Ring ∞", so there would be no good outcome from providing general-purpose access to it. So, the keys will never be released.

- it's thusly not possible to map the signed (encrypted) firmware to the source.

- even if the source had a clearly documented "master off" in it, you can never know if the firmware's copy reads "master-except-if-A-and-B-say-C off" :(

What are you on about? I had a 4-core i7 in my laptop back in 2013, an i7-3920XM IIRC:

https://ark.intel.com/products/64887/Intel-Core-i7-3920XM-Pr...

> suddently it's possible for them to release i7 notebook CPUs with more then two cores

I'm not sure what you mean by this. My Dell XPS 15 has a i7-6700HQ which is quad core, and it's not like I just bought the thing.

> release i7 notebook CPUs with more then two cores

U-series i7s have two cores. HQ-series i7s have four cores. Both are mobile CPUs. Remember though that more cores generally means more power consumption which generally means less wallclock time on battery power.

Intel's U-8XXX CPUs are rumored to offer 4 cores with a variable TDP from 18-45W this autumn.

It's my tinfoil hat theory why MS waits for an earnest update on their highend Surfacebook. A high-end quad-core Surfacebook with a 10-series GPU and 32GB LPDDR with real Thunderbolt 3 Ports would make for a 13" dreammachine...

first mobile quad cores were sandy bridge released january 2011

? Nehalem had mobile quad cores. I'm using one right now.

Specifically the Clarksfield processors from 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarksfield_(microprocessor)

Predating the i7 entirely, there were also quad core laptops using Core 2 Quad CPUs (Penryn QC) in 2008.

Indeed (have some of those too), but I assumed we'd artificially limited ourselves to talking about i7. I'm not sure why I assumed that, because you're right of course.

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