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Raptor Engineering makes/may eventually make(?) the "Talos Secure Workstation" based on POWER8. They claim "schematics and libre (fully open and auditable) fir
by topspin 9y ago
Raptor Engineering makes/may eventually make(?) the "Talos Secure Workstation" based on POWER8. They claim "schematics and libre (fully open and auditable) firmware also are included." Don't know; don't own one. A mere $5,300 gets/might get you an 8 core workstation.
IBM makes POWER CPUs and you may assume that -- unless they've disclosed something -- no one other than IBM and the NSA really know if there are any unauditable "support" processors on the die. Beyond that the Raptor site mentions that there are still some bits you don't get to know about their system: "several pages will be redacted on the public schematic due to mandatory NDAs with a few of our support silicon vendors."
Everything else is SOC/MCU stuff; nothing that approaches the capabilities of these Intel and AMD CPUs. You could hold out on older pre-ME/PSP systems until RISC-V goes through enough evolution and market success to achieve parity with then-contemporary devices, sometime around 2035 I'd guess...
Answer to your question is, in most cases, simply no.
- bubblethink 9y ago>until RISC-V goes through enough evolution and market success to achieve parity with then-contemporary devices, sometime around 2035 I'd guess... RISC-V just refers to the ISA, right ? An implementation by a vendor may still have ME/PSP like stuff, just like the x86 ISA has nothing to do with ME/PSP.
- topspin 9y agoSure. One can imagine a 64-bit 24 core RISC-V CPU with 60 billion transistors, all backdoored by some management processor. Perhaps by then the management CPU will be an x86 core running Linux. :)