Economy of scale. The ME isn't just a management tool but is also used to help initialize the CPU. No reason to write a whole custom way of doing that instead o

Economy of scale. The ME isn't just a management tool but is also used to help initialize the CPU. No reason to write a whole custom way of doing that instead of reusing the same technology. Also, customer CPUs are often (due to binning) rebranded Enterprise CPUs that were rejected (or just not purchased) for whatever reason, or vice versa. Easier to build ME on them all and configure it later. Your ECC memory? It's something Intel just flips on or off depending on how they want to sell the chip - many Core i7s and i9s have it on-die but you can't use it. That's because it might be useful on a Xeon Platinum equivalent.