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> Intel will just maintain the status quo until there's some sort of black swan event.

I absolutely hate Intel and AMD for sabotaging their customers like that. Please people, get to that black swan event ASAP.




If we're unlucky, the 'black swan event' will be something along the likes of Pluto's Kiss. Imagine a Morris worm equivalent, but which bricks the computers it infects after destroying the filesystem.

Even if everyone has backups of everything, offline, it'll be years before all the destroyed computers can actually be replaced. This isn't a scenario I want to happen for real.


On the plus side, you can probably guarantee it would only ever happen once.


Haha, no, you can't. Since when do humans learn from their mistakes?


Not infrequently, but it's in vogue to hold the belief that they don't.


You could do some much more interesting things with a hack than wiping and bricking a bunch of computers, even if the bricking part is doable.


As a note, the latest AGESA for Ryzen seems to have the ability to turn off the PSP, it is showing up in some of the latest beta bios releases.

No official statement yet, but some info can be had here: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-PSP-...


"BIOS PSP Support disabled" is the only statement we have, in the form of a new option in the BIOS Setup.

That sounds like the equivalent of "HECI Disabled" for Intel BIOSes, which has been around for years.

It doesn't do anything to shut down the hidden CPU (PSP). It just sends a command to disable the bridge over to the main CPU. All the other ways of talking to the PSP remain open.


ASRock support says it disables CPU <-> PSP communication. https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7j2i8f/asrock_replies_...


I also hate Intel and AMD for that, but I think they'd prefer we didn't hate them. I conclude that there are big reasons to still do what we hate them for. I'm afraid even a black swan event wouldn't make those reasons go away.

What I think needs to happen is for other countries to realize this issue is a matter of national security, and to fund development of alternatives.


They don't care at all if we hate them, because we're still buying their chips en masse.


Well, I will not buy an Intel CPU anymore. I also try to avoid Intel in all other chip classes like networking chips where Intel is suspiciously active. Sometimes I wonder if their name is giveaway that people just don't realize. Soon I intend to move to an Intel-free single board computer for my day-to-day computer usage. Now, for other people I can't speak.




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