Finally? That ME thing should be nowhere near private and confidential data. There's constantly bugs being found in it [1][2]. Honestly if you are a large company, organisation, government, etc and you are using Intel or AMD products, then you are being very irresponsible. There is no excuse, enough information is out there that even a non-technical CTO should know better.

1. https://www.wired.com/story/intel-management-engine-vulnerab...

2. https://wccftech.com/intel-management-engine-not-fixed/

What i don't understand is how they managed to avoid to be sued to death after this. Not only the initial mistake, but their attitude after it.

Certainly state actors, and militaries, have somebody somewhere being crazy mad about this and the right pay grade to act.

There is quite literally no viable alternative to x86 for 95% (more like 99.9%, but I am being generous) of the server and workstation market. Pretending like there is and anyone choosing x86 is irresponsible is just being a smug fool.

I would say the server market could easily adapt to Arm, Power or RISC. However I would concede it's very difficult to replace the desktop/laptop workstation. However Chromebooks are making great strives on this. Yes, they are still sending lots of data to Googles servers, but they do a lot of opensource work. Look at coreboot with depthcharge, which can give you a pretty free (not 100%) Arm notebook.

The newest super computer, summit, ranked as the largest/fastest runs ppc64le which definitely creates an argument that there is an alternative to x86 for servers.

Things that run on super computers tend to be developed specifically for that exact computer so they can use whatever they want.

POWER is actually competitive on price/performance now.

Eh… Not for the home enthusiast workstation market.

The CPUs are actually kinda reasonable (Raptor sells the 8-core for $595, which is only $95 more than the launch price of the Ryzen 1800X).

But the lite mainboard is $1,099.

That's 5-10 times more that a board for Ryzen. And a lot is missing on the "lite".

Context here is "server and workstation market".

The Ryzen 1800X is not a comparable CPU.

Huh? This has nothing to do with x86.

I heard Google spends a lot of money and effort to (slowly) move to Power9. It does have a management processor but it's open for inspection and modification.

Maybe other cloud providers, and/or private clouds, would consider that.

Source on that? I'd love to use that as a prodding stick to shove all my java/node stuff off of x86..

Google Confirms POWER9 Processor Data Center Deployment At OpenPOWER Summit 2018 https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/03/19/head...

IBM Begins Power9 Rollout with Backing from DOE, Google https://www.hpcwire.com/2017/12/06/ibm-begins-power9-rollout...

Google's Data Centers Now Have IBM Inside https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/03/22/googles-data-cente...

Introducing Zaius, Google and Rackspace’s open server running IBM POWER9 https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/10/introducing-Zai...

They're also a platinum-level member of the OpenPOWER consortium (i.e. they have a position on the board of directors).

Thanks! Time to poke the bees!

What is crazy is that we sent people to Google about moving stuff to their cloud offering, and when I asked about the Power9 thing nobody knew anything!

Would be incredibly awesome to see POWER9 options on Google's public cloud VMs…

Meanwhile, ARMv8 is already available to the public!

packet.net offers access to a full dedicated dual ThunderX box for $0.5/hr (or 0.1 with spot instances).

Scaleway offers KVM virtual machines (also on ThunderX) for as little as €2.99/month (€0.006/hr).

First gen ThunderX kinda sucks at single-thread performance, but you get many cores and… well, you get to start using non-x86 machines, on public cloud, right now.

If developers start actually using ARM boxes for their projects, the providers will be more likely to expand in this direction, and maybe in a year (or less?) we'll see the much more powerful ThunderX2 boxes available, and hopefully more providers will get into this…

I'd bet that Google has probably 10x more engineers working on improving the situation with their various Intel chipsets (being on laptops, or servers), than those working on "Plan B" (Power9), or "Plan C" (RISC-V) solutions.