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Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

At the end of the day we still have the third party me_cleaner to disable the proprietary secret coprocessor on Intel chips while AMD chips still have their equivalent PSP With no first or third party means to disable it.

Until such a time I can get the equivalent tool to stop the hardware spyware built into the CPU I can have no enthusiasm or motivation to buy AMD chips. Not to say I want to buy Intel parts - they have nothing to do with third party efforts to nullify their backdoor - but if I were buying a chip tomorrow it would be a begrudging Intel purchase just for me_cleaner.

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What percentage of Intel owners have run the ME-cleaner software? Probably infinitesimally small.

If AMD wants to dominate they don’t need to care about your particular use-case at all in fact. They just need to produce the fastest x86 chips at the cheapest price.

I think the problem is that me-cleaner is a 3rd party solution, I'm not sure I would trust it not to brick my CPU. If AMD solved this, it would be a huge differentiator in my eyes, and I think it would further boost their sales. That said, I suspect there is some deal with 3 letter agencies that doesn't allow them to do that. It doesn't make sense to go against their customers like that otherwise.

For a desktop - if you're running Linux (or maybe FreeBSD?) - then the POWER9 based Talos workstations seem like a reasonable alternative:

https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/

Pricy, but they don't have the ME/PSP problem.

Lisa Su sounded like she'd be in the boat to open the PSP source when she was on Reddit. It seems that she only learned later that she can't do that.

The Platform Security Processor (and the code to make it work) is licensed from ARM, AMD did hire a 3rd party to audit the PSP after that thread on Reddit blew up. The results indicated the need for a rewrite, so in 5 to 6 years hopefully AMD will own the IP to their new PSP.

Really? Are the audit results or an announcement about them public?

The audit results aren't public, primarily due to them not being good: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6o2e6t/amd_is_not_open...

Where are you seeing the results of this audit?

You can disable PSP on some motherboards AFAIK. My motherboard has an option that at least seems like it disables PSP.

What is the model?

That option makes the PSP invisible to the running OS, but no one knows what is left running on the PSP.

My MSI X399 Gaming Pro Carbon AC motherboard had an option to disable the PSP, but it was removed in the latest bios update. The latest one has an option to turn on SVM (Secure Virtual Machine, needed for virtualization). I can either run VMs _or_ have PSP disabled...

Enabling virtualization is pretty simple, someone could probably write a little EFI app to do it and chainload from there.

You're relying on a third-party community effort to disable their coproprietary processor, which neither company seems to have the will to so by themselves.

The best outcome would be to have AMD provide a first-party, auditable option to disable it, otherwise the community will have to do it themselves, which will probably take longer if there's less people using them. Until then, the main focus would be the buy the best performing product, because that's the only real differentiator.

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