Intel IME, AMD PSP, have both long been thought of as hardware backdoors. AMD's licensed zen1 chips that China makes, whose name excapes me at the moment, have

Intel IME, AMD PSP, have both long been thought of as hardware backdoors. AMD's licensed zen1 chips that China makes, whose name excapes me at the moment, have the AES instructions and PSP removed. They're also banned from being imported by the state dept, so, that's either because they're also backdoored by china somehow, or, they aren't backdoor-able, maybe both. Suffice to say however, modern computers (and smartphones) are chock full of potentially spooky SoC's and someone like ol'vlad might just be paranoid enough to not trust them.