Yes, and that's been proven by the nerds (term of endearment) who figured all this stuff out. But the fact is that the hardware is still there however useless. Newer Intel chips have made the IME part of the boot process, which means patching the firmware effectively disables the chip. Unfortunate. This is a huge rabbit hole, but I encourage everyone to read up on it.
That is not necessarily true. OK, they might all work that way in practice but it is not necessarily so. For instance, even if we assume that hardware needs machine code level instructions to function those instructions could be in a regular ROM which cannot then be changed by flashing.
Also, below machine code level hardware works on microcode. That could also be in a Read Only Memory chip or even built-in. Early CPUs used to use counters and logic gates to produce the sequence of instructions required so not even a ROM would be necessary.
Then we have the Intel CPU recall from many years ago. If the chips could have been re-flashed instead of collected in and replacements issued don't you think they might have done that?
All that is before we start on the Chinese hack of Super Micro motherboards. They added extra components during the manufacturing state and they sent data back to China.
Yes, and that's been proven by the nerds (term of endearment) who figured all this stuff out. But the fact is that the hardware is still there however useless. Newer Intel chips have made the IME part of the boot process, which means patching the firmware effectively disables the chip. Unfortunate. This is a huge rabbit hole, but I encourage everyone to read up on it.
Do AMD chips have something similar to IME or no?
Yes
That is not necessarily true. OK, they might all work that way in practice but it is not necessarily so. For instance, even if we assume that hardware needs machine code level instructions to function those instructions could be in a regular ROM which cannot then be changed by flashing.
Also, below machine code level hardware works on microcode. That could also be in a Read Only Memory chip or even built-in. Early CPUs used to use counters and logic gates to produce the sequence of instructions required so not even a ROM would be necessary.
Then we have the Intel CPU recall from many years ago. If the chips could have been re-flashed instead of collected in and replacements issued don't you think they might have done that?
All that is before we start on the Chinese hack of Super Micro motherboards. They added extra components during the manufacturing state and they sent data back to China.