The question is not whether some proprietary solution looks “free enough” if you squint your eyes more than the other proprietary solution. The question is whether people understand that chain of trust that ends in someone else's hands has its problems no matter how big that someone is, and bother to fix that vulnerability.
Would the developing J-Cores[0] being worked on by 0pf[1] be able to catch up (I'm thinking more along the lines of performance of recent mobile processors, not desktop processors)? I am under the impression that, while a monumental task is ahead of them, they have the boon of hindsight. Of a dozen processor architectures competing back then only a handful survived the decade and only 2 or 3 are being fabbed now (i386/amd64, ARMvX, and IBM?) and they can base decisions on the successes and failures of other chipsets, speeding up the development process. Is that fallacious thinking?
I know most of their goals are along the lines of getting custom fabs down to $20k and making the term "penny processor" a household term, but is there potential (read:hope) for a secure, performant (whatever that means to you) processor that we can use for daily computing without fear of a hardware-based backdoor?
Performance is definitely a difficult sacrifice. Consider however that your general computing could be split into a privacy sensitive component: sending emails/messages, assembling documents, banking website, etc, and a privacy insensitive component: compiling OSS, playing games, etc. Composing/sending email for example is not computationally demanding... so one might use a high performance Intel machine for insensitive computing and a lower performance libre machine for sensitive work. It's not perfect (web browsing can be both private and not, and demanding and not) but a refinement of this separation approach could be an interim solution until high performance libre hardware is available.
What would you recommend in terms of a really "libre" hardware?