5 ms·

It's such a pity that there is no real competition in that area. (Unless you go the totally different architectures such as ARM or RISC-V.) AMD had the chance

by vog 9y ago

It's such a pity that there is no real competition in that area. (Unless you go the totally different architectures such as ARM or RISC-V.) AMD had the chance to differentiate from Intel here, instead they blindly immitate the same customer-hostile stunt.

microcolonel 9y ago
I don't want to get too deep into imagination, but the details of the ME/PSP story make it seem like an outside force of some sort is compelling them to add this stuff to their platforms.
- vog 9y ago
  It's indeed nice to imagine that the people behind Intel are relieved that somebody finally found the kill-switch they left behind in the monster they had to create. And the AMD people now thinking hard how they can leak hints to their kill-switch in an inconspicuous way, too. But that's indeed imagination. Unforunately, we don't (yet) know much about their motivations.
  - tzahola 9y ago
    I love this Intel redemption arc!
  - my123 9y ago
    ME is used for market segmentation too, from locking hyperthreading to overclocking capablities. (they used to sell product update keys for some Pentium CPUs that were processed by an applet on the ME...)
- fragmede 9y ago
  The invisible hand of the market is sufficient to explain it, no nefarious conspiracy necessary. For servers far away in a data-center, there needs to be some sort of "oh shit" access for when the OS dies, and this is implemented in high-end servers as separate second computer inside the server with its own ethernet port (ILOM), however the extra hardware costs more to manufacture. Intel decided it wanted a piece of that pie, and in an effort to improve margins, and sell more CPUs, Intel thought: "what if we offer the same feature, but use less hardware?" and made it part of their chipset. As a feature that businesses actually want, and they buy CPUs in the 10,000's/year, compared to maybe 1/year I might buy for personal use. AMD implemented similar in order to keep up and remain competitive in the market. Intel desktop chipsets aren't wholly different from their server chipsets, and they share some internals. Intel also realized that, since they already paid for development of the technology that it would be useful for administrators of a computer lab to be able to have remote admin access, and made it a requisite part of all systems. Again, AMD implemented the same to keep up. It could also be part of an NSA plot (it is part of their mission, after all), but "the market" where individuals don't count as much as corporate buyers, is sufficient to explain the situation.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    Yeah, I am not saying that the mere presence and integration of ME/PSP is indicative of a nefarious plot, these things have commercial merit which is obvious to anyone who knows anything. I'm saying that the specific way that both vendors are handling this is uncharacteristic at least for Intel, and suspicious because it leaves a lot of crucial ethical and technical questions completely unanswered. There are some obvious reasons why it's not completely open, notably that ME enables feature unlocking keys and DRM at a lower cost than more hardware-involved approaches; but I don't think that explains the recent PR attempts and complete dodging of this issue.
    - lamontcg 9y ago
      > is uncharacteristic at least for Intel Have you worked in large enterprise organizations that sold things to other large enterprise organizations? Did you go read the bit about how banks were pressuring Intel to include full blown JVMs into the ME and they resisted that? > leaves a lot of crucial ethical and technical questions completely unanswered. The truth is mundane which is that Intel wanted money from Banks, and a bunch of workers tried to split the difference between giving the Banks everything they wanted and trying not to engineer gaping security holes. They were operating with imperfect information and got that equation wrong. And the truth is that no company in the world attempts to engineer for perfect security. When security runs up against economic concerns they try to balance the costs and benefits. Assume that we (you the reader) can know perfectly which possible vulnerabilities are actually exploitable and which are not. If Intel spends any time on possible vulnerabilities which in practice are not exploitable or never exploitable, that is entirely wasted time. If AMD spends no time at all on those, AMD can focus on shipping features and get ahead of Intel doing useful work. Since Intel and AMD cannot have perfect information, they make guesses as to the impact of possible security holes. That naturally will always result in them "cutting corners" from the perspective of someone who measures them only on their security posture. Enterprise corporations like this are a complicated non-linear non-convex optimization algorithm that attempts to balance economic, security and other concerns against a complicated and shifting landscape in the face of imperfect information. Any company that tried to have always perfect security would largely fail in the marketplace. This is related to the explanation of why the locks on the front door of your house or apartment can likely easily be picked. Security concerns are sacrificed for economic concerns, commonly, everywhere around you.
vim_wannabe 9y ago
Any clue as to why they chose not to differentiate? Is it too costly to build a separate non-remote CPU for non-enterprise? Does it provide some useful functionality for regular consumers? The answer is probably they do not think there's a market for it, but still makes me wonder.
- lowry 9y ago
  Enterprise motherboards had IPMI forever. None complained until laymen found out the same thing sits inside -their- computers.
  - dsr_ 9y ago
    IPMI is supposed to be a tiny computer that listens for authorized network requests to turn on the main machine, reboot it, and connect a serial session to the console so you have a hope of recovering access when somebody has screwed up the main networking configuration. Loads of us (sysadmins) complained that IPMI (DRAC, LOM...) had frequent security issues, wasn't running open-source code that we could inspect, and kept growing new features without any sense of responsibility. We were especially irked when a dedicated IPMI ethernet port got shared with a micro switch to a normal system ethernet port, and it was not possible to turn that behavior off. Don't say we didn't complain. Say that we were not successful in having motherboard manufacturers implement the features we want in a secure and controllable manner.
Taek 9y ago
There's a good reason that there isn't any real competition. Hardware design is extremely difficult, and extremely labor intensive. amd64 has an overwhelming number of op-codes, and competitively implementing all of them is a multi-billion dollar project. If you want to compete with Intel or AMD in the CPU market, you are talking tens of billions in NRE before you ever have something that is remotely competitive. And then you have to do it all over when we switch from 14nm to 7nm, and then again when we go from 7nm to 3nm. If you want more competition, you have to level the playing field by banning most of the op-codes. But even then you still have crazy amounts of pipelining and other optimizations which are nontrivial to figure out and very expensive to implement. Intel is in a great position.
efreak 9y ago
ARM has TrustZone, though I have no idea what that's capable of or how it differs from ME/AMT/PSP/etc or how prevalent it is.
rdtsc 9y ago
Wonder what POWER processors have?

by vog 9y ago

microcolonel 9y ago

I don't want to get too deep into imagination, but the details of the ME/PSP story make it seem like an outside force of some sort is compelling them to add this stuff to their platforms.

vog 9y ago
It's indeed nice to imagine that the people behind Intel are relieved that somebody finally found the kill-switch they left behind in the monster they had to create. And the AMD people now thinking hard how they can leak hints to their kill-switch in an inconspicuous way, too. But that's indeed imagination. Unforunately, we don't (yet) know much about their motivations.
- tzahola 9y ago
  I love this Intel redemption arc!
- my123 9y ago
  ME is used for market segmentation too, from locking hyperthreading to overclocking capablities. (they used to sell product update keys for some Pentium CPUs that were processed by an applet on the ME...)
fragmede 9y ago
The invisible hand of the market is sufficient to explain it, no nefarious conspiracy necessary. For servers far away in a data-center, there needs to be some sort of "oh shit" access for when the OS dies, and this is implemented in high-end servers as separate second computer inside the server with its own ethernet port (ILOM), however the extra hardware costs more to manufacture. Intel decided it wanted a piece of that pie, and in an effort to improve margins, and sell more CPUs, Intel thought: "what if we offer the same feature, but use less hardware?" and made it part of their chipset. As a feature that businesses actually want, and they buy CPUs in the 10,000's/year, compared to maybe 1/year I might buy for personal use. AMD implemented similar in order to keep up and remain competitive in the market. Intel desktop chipsets aren't wholly different from their server chipsets, and they share some internals. Intel also realized that, since they already paid for development of the technology that it would be useful for administrators of a computer lab to be able to have remote admin access, and made it a requisite part of all systems. Again, AMD implemented the same to keep up. It could also be part of an NSA plot (it is part of their mission, after all), but "the market" where individuals don't count as much as corporate buyers, is sufficient to explain the situation.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  Yeah, I am not saying that the mere presence and integration of ME/PSP is indicative of a nefarious plot, these things have commercial merit which is obvious to anyone who knows anything. I'm saying that the specific way that both vendors are handling this is uncharacteristic at least for Intel, and suspicious because it leaves a lot of crucial ethical and technical questions completely unanswered. There are some obvious reasons why it's not completely open, notably that ME enables feature unlocking keys and DRM at a lower cost than more hardware-involved approaches; but I don't think that explains the recent PR attempts and complete dodging of this issue.
  - lamontcg 9y ago
    > is uncharacteristic at least for Intel Have you worked in large enterprise organizations that sold things to other large enterprise organizations? Did you go read the bit about how banks were pressuring Intel to include full blown JVMs into the ME and they resisted that? > leaves a lot of crucial ethical and technical questions completely unanswered. The truth is mundane which is that Intel wanted money from Banks, and a bunch of workers tried to split the difference between giving the Banks everything they wanted and trying not to engineer gaping security holes. They were operating with imperfect information and got that equation wrong. And the truth is that no company in the world attempts to engineer for perfect security. When security runs up against economic concerns they try to balance the costs and benefits. Assume that we (you the reader) can know perfectly which possible vulnerabilities are actually exploitable and which are not. If Intel spends any time on possible vulnerabilities which in practice are not exploitable or never exploitable, that is entirely wasted time. If AMD spends no time at all on those, AMD can focus on shipping features and get ahead of Intel doing useful work. Since Intel and AMD cannot have perfect information, they make guesses as to the impact of possible security holes. That naturally will always result in them "cutting corners" from the perspective of someone who measures them only on their security posture. Enterprise corporations like this are a complicated non-linear non-convex optimization algorithm that attempts to balance economic, security and other concerns against a complicated and shifting landscape in the face of imperfect information. Any company that tried to have always perfect security would largely fail in the marketplace. This is related to the explanation of why the locks on the front door of your house or apartment can likely easily be picked. Security concerns are sacrificed for economic concerns, commonly, everywhere around you.

vim_wannabe 9y ago

Any clue as to why they chose not to differentiate? Is it too costly to build a separate non-remote CPU for non-enterprise? Does it provide some useful functionality for regular consumers? The answer is probably they do not think there's a market for it, but still makes me wonder.

lowry 9y ago
Enterprise motherboards had IPMI forever. None complained until laymen found out the same thing sits inside -their- computers.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  IPMI is supposed to be a tiny computer that listens for authorized network requests to turn on the main machine, reboot it, and connect a serial session to the console so you have a hope of recovering access when somebody has screwed up the main networking configuration. Loads of us (sysadmins) complained that IPMI (DRAC, LOM...) had frequent security issues, wasn't running open-source code that we could inspect, and kept growing new features without any sense of responsibility. We were especially irked when a dedicated IPMI ethernet port got shared with a micro switch to a normal system ethernet port, and it was not possible to turn that behavior off. Don't say we didn't complain. Say that we were not successful in having motherboard manufacturers implement the features we want in a secure and controllable manner.

Taek 9y ago

There's a good reason that there isn't any real competition. Hardware design is extremely difficult, and extremely labor intensive. amd64 has an overwhelming number of op-codes, and competitively implementing all of them is a multi-billion dollar project. If you want to compete with Intel or AMD in the CPU market, you are talking tens of billions in NRE before you ever have something that is remotely competitive. And then you have to do it all over when we switch from 14nm to 7nm, and then again when we go from 7nm to 3nm. If you want more competition, you have to level the playing field by banning most of the op-codes. But even then you still have crazy amounts of pipelining and other optimizations which are nontrivial to figure out and very expensive to implement. Intel is in a great position.

efreak 9y ago

ARM has TrustZone, though I have no idea what that's capable of or how it differs from ME/AMT/PSP/etc or how prevalent it is.

rdtsc 9y ago

Wonder what POWER processors have?