> Intel AMT uses a hardware-based out-of-band (OOB) communication channel[1] that operates regardless of the presence of a working operating system. The communication channel is independent of the PC's power state, the presence of a management agent, and the state of many hardware components such as hard disk drives and memory.
> Almost all AMT features are available even if the PC is in a powered-off state but with its power cord attached, if the operating system has crashed, if the software agent is missing, or if hardware (such as a hard drive or memory) has failed.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno...
The modern Intel socket CPUs are more like application accelerator cards for this hidden "mother" core. Until recently, you could think of your Intel computer more as an ARC[1] PC with an embedded Intel support slot, than as a pure Intel PC. If you wanted to, you could write a custom BIOS that would boot a Haswell-era motherboard with no CPU inserted, and it would run just fine—because the motherboard already ships with all the CPU it needs to act as a functional computer. (And with the hack on the article, you could run your own software on such a PC, too!)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synopsys#ARC_International
So no, you can't really remove the ME; it functionally "is" the computer in a lot of ways.
Of course, you could remove its ability to run software other than its kernel—but this doesn't make it "brain dead" or "switch it off"; it just makes it do very slightly less. There's still a lot of (necessary!) stuff going on in there.
Has anyone actually done this? If you have a link to someone who's run a board using only the ME processor I'd be really interested to see it!
I thought the ME was covered in all kind of NDA and proprietary goodness. Booting a board without the main x86 installed would be quite a feat of reverse engineering!