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Actually they are cheap - the reason why a significant amount of on chip resources can be assembled into the IME on all of Intel's chipsets is because IC proces
by Joking_Phantom 9y ago
Actually they are cheap - the reason why a significant amount of on chip resources can be assembled into the IME on all of Intel's chipsets is because IC process technology has advanced by many orders of magnitude. The Pentium 4 represented the edge of consumer grade CPUs 10 years ago, and it was around that time we reached practical limits on frequency. As hardware manufacturing shifted towards more cores and caches, SoC ICs became the standard. Slapping a cheap, low power system of CPU and memory on every chipset is easy, cheap and natural.
With extra hardware being cheap and easy, Intel put 2 and 2 together and tried to monetize this by offering businesses extra capabilities as a standard. Obviously this introduces new attack vectors, and the opaque nature of this new "standard" feature attracts attention from all sides.
- digi_owl 9y agoIndeed. Moore's law is an observation on the transistor size on a die, how they halved in size every x months. This allows one to do either more complex chips (more features etc), cheaper chips (more chips pr die means a higher yeild of functioning chips) or faster chips (lower voltage, less heat, higher clock). But the clock increase have stopped, and Intel is loath to lower chip prices without some serious competition forcing them, so they keep coming up with new features to justify the price as they shrink the transistors.
- otakucode 9y agoYou don't hide features you implemented in order to sell your product to customers.
- fao_ 9y agoWhy not? It's worked so far >_>
- AceJohnny2 9y agoThey're "packaged" "solutions"!
- oliwarner 9y agoThat's Intel's whole chip business model. Make a high end part and selectively disable features to form cheaper SKUs. It's also part of the chip binning process, allowing you to sell near-100% of what you make. Nvidia and AMD do this too.