> The ME does have a legitimate function, but it does so much more now, as it takes care of the hardware initialization, the main CPU boot up, control of the clock registers, DRM management for Audio/Video, software based TPM and more.

In other words, the ME is to Intel boards as Apple’s T2 chip is to their recent notebooks: an SoC that takes on the real role of being the “system processor”, turning the [rest of the] socketed CPU into effectively an “application processor.”

In fact, given that it’s so self-sufficient, it’s interesting that Intel choose to ship the ME as an “IP core” of the CPU itself, rather than making it part of the off-die Intel PCH chipset that they supply to mobo vendors. Is it just to provide the ME with low-latency access to CPU components like ALUs (for TPM encryption circuits) and d-cache (for packet sniffing)? Because it seems like it isn’t really built this way, and an “external ME” would be just fine running without a CPU socketed in at all. (Which would be neat, honestly; if you could exploit an external ME, you could run software on your Intel-chipset motherboard without a “real” CPU!)

Given that industry players seem to be all trending toward this design in one way or another (even game consoles did the “system SoC” / “application CPU” split with the last two generations), I wonder if this design pattern will ever be standardized, in the way that interrupt controllers or MMUs were standardized. Will we ever see an open-hardware board with its own open-hardware system-management SoC running FOSS firmware?