"you can be sure, to within measurement precision" I'm not sure how readily available are this kind of tools for the average joe, correct me if I'm wrong I do

"you can be sure, to within measurement precision" I'm not sure how readily available are this kind of tools for the average joe, correct me if I'm wrong I do also thing is a destructive process, taking as a basis the Core 2 Duo P8400 that the X200 on the libreboot laptop which as per intel page is built on 45nm fabrication[0] and as Wikipedia mention (I know wikipedia could not be a trusted source of information for this) "This attack is not very common because it requires a large investment in effort and special equipment that is generally only available to large chip manufacturers. " [1] which still sounds logical. about " but you can at least make sure they are behaving generally as CPUs or modems or RAM might at the boundaries between them" you know this is close to impossible, check for example how the RAM tests are performed where a set of patterns are tested and you have some degree of certainty [2] and for which they last concludes "It should be obvious that this strategy requires an exact knowledge of how the memory cells are laid out on the chip. In addition there is a never ending number of possible chip layouts for different chip types and manufacturers making this strategy impractical. However, there are testing algorithms that can approximate this ideal. " notice approximate to ideal. "If you build a system with enough small chips doing simple tasks" and this is the path to take, a new set of trust-able cpus... but it's not one of the current options. [0] http://ark.intel.com/products/35569/Intel-Core2-Duo-Processor-P8400-3M-Cache-2_26-GHz-1066-MHz-FSB http://ark.intel.com/products/35569/Intel-Core2-Duo-Processo... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Reverse_engineering_of_integrated_circuits.2Fsmart_cards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering#Reverse_en... [2] http://www.memtest86.com/technical.htm http://www.memtest86.com/technical.htm