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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder if this will at all dissuade either Intel or AMD into continuing to make these super privileged processors

They clearly invested some serious money into this sort of thing and see it as a differentiator (or AMD wouldn't have followed suit). Chances that they'll throw it all away because of a few vulnerabilities are very, very thin.

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AMD has had their own version of this for quite some time. Its called the Platform Security Processor (PSP), it has been in anything AMD since around 2013 [0]. I am not sure if Ryzen / Threadripper has it, but I would be surprised if it didn't.

[0] https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd-platform-security-process...

> AMD has had their own version of this for quite some time. Its called the Platform Security Processor (PSP),

According to the small footnote at http://www.amd.com/en-gb/innovations/software-technologies/s... AMD does not use the name "Platform Security Processor (PSP)" anymore, but calls it "AMD Secure Processor" instead.

If I'm not mistaken, PSP is not at all like ME, it runs code if you supply it with such but on it's own it doesn't listen to network traffic or run it's own OS, atleast, last I checked.

I'd still consider AMD the better player in the game.

Throwing it away is unlikely but the fact that this affects Xeon processors means that pretty much every single data center across the world could be affected. And that means that a lot of companies with a lot of money will complain.

> "...a lot of companies with a lot of money will complain."

Maybe, but they'll only complain for about five minutes. Then, they'll patch everything and move on and forget about it.

Until the next time. Rinse and repeat.

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