> but “Open” isn’t everything I never claimed it was, and this is starting to reek of a straw-man argument where you’re opposing a statement I haven’t actually

> but “Open” isn’t everything I never claimed it was, and this is starting to reek of a straw-man argument where you’re opposing a statement I haven’t actually made. (1) Yes, I am aware of situations where this architecture has been chosen by a body that isn’t a chief implementor, and no, I am not at liberty to discuss it. (2) Having an open spec to compare against, even though I actually don’t know how, is already another plane of existence compared to not having something to compare against. Decapping and microscopy? Pushing edge cases onto the chip and comparing expected outputs? Implementing all or part on an FPGA and seeing how they compare at a severely clock-reduced rate? It’s well beyond my technical ability, but it’s not beyond expert technicians’ abilities. That’s the key point. EDIT: Also you can set your own keys for the root trust, and remove others’. That’s very important, and radically orthogonal to the competition of ARM and x86₆₄.