It's in the name, it's for management of enterprise deployments of machines that have Intel CPUs[1]. It's a fairly important thing for most enterprises (sort of

It's in the name, it's for management of enterprise deployments of machines that have Intel CPUs[1]. It's a fairly important thing for most enterprises (sort of like IPMI but it's not just for servers), as it allows you to do a variety of things to all computers that you manage. Now, whether that feature should be part of every consumer CPU is a valid question and concern -- one that nobody has the answer to. Likely the reason for this is that modern versions of ME also do hardware initialisation[2], so it would make sense for Intel to not require manufacturers to rewrite all of that code for their consumer machines. There have been exploits in Intel ME in the past, which are quite concerning (and the fact it's proprietary is obviously a concern, given how many privileges it has over the system). You can neuter Intel ME on old machines (pre-BootGuard) using me_cleaner[3], but it requires attaching a flash programmer to your motherboard. If you have coreboot you can do it from userspace. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno... [2]: https://www.coreboot.org/Intel_Management_Engine https://www.coreboot.org/Intel_Management_Engine [3]: https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner