Like mentioned in another comment, the ME runs on a separate CPU. What might be of concern to real-time workloads are SMM interrupts, which AFAIU run on the ma

Like mentioned in another comment, the ME runs on a separate CPU. What might be of concern to real-time workloads are SMM interrupts, which AFAIU run on the main CPU and trap into the firmware. The NERF project might help here too, in that they are looking to either disable SMM or direct them to the Linux kernel.