3 ms·
> It’s expensive to produce chip variants, so doubtless that further cost pressures on Intel lead to them putting the ME their core shared across all products.
by stordoff 9y ago
> It’s expensive to produce chip variants, so doubtless that further cost pressures on Intel lead to them putting the ME their core shared across all products.
Would it be possible in future CPU designs to put a jumper in, e.g., the ME power path? Closed by default (and possibly forced closed in enterprise-targeted devices), but the option exists to disable the ME without requiring an additional CPU variant.
- zgramana 9y agoFrom a hardware perspective, it’s an easy problem to solve. This is a wetware problem, however. Back when ME’s were discrete, you would inevitably have some with, some without. Someone would order a bunch of machines without them to “save money” or they bought a model that just didn’t have an ME add on offered by the OEM. That meant that occasionally you had to actually have the machine in your presence to service it. You end up designing two processes/procedures based on whether you are remote or not. Lack of ME’s actually increased labor costs by reducing the number of machines a tech could manage (on average). Having an CPU fuse essentially winds the clock back to the discrete ME days. Someone will place an order order for SKU ENCH-81-U instead of EMCH-81-U and you end up with 500 machines with the ME fuse blown. Inevitably there will be a big enough restock fee that someone in accounting will say “just use them.” (The same applies to things like having/not having a TPM module, etc.)