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Re:Disabling the Intel Management Engine by cyphar on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @05:59PM (#15445677)
The purpose is in the name, it's used for management. When Intel sells you their expensive management solution for your enterprise deployment of machines with Intel CPUs, this is one of the technologies that is used.

Neither AMD nor modern ARM chips are much better in this regard, both have some form of management system (AMD has a "Secure Processor" based on ARM's TrustZone, and ARM has TrustZone).

Re:Disabling the Intel Management Engine by severine on Tuesday October 10, 2017 @07:29PM (#15446126)
Naive questions: How does that work?

If $comercial_seller buys $chip_vendor expensive management solution does then have "legal backdoor" access to any device it sells?

What's the "chain of command" for accessing the IMEs of this world?

Re:Disabling the Intel Management Engine by closeparen on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @02:59AM (#15447769)
Configured in BIOS menus by smaller shops, or preconfigured from the factory for the specific machines that enterprise customers are buying in bulk. (Enterprise accounts with Dell, HP, etc. can also get their corporate image preloaded at the factory to avoid any onsite provisioning).

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/remote-configurati...