Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage

Re:Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoin... by latentsea on Thursday January 08, 2026 @12:37PM (#46543898)

> So in the first couple sends of power on, your CPU is at various points ARM, i386, x86, and x86_64

First I'm learning about this and I'm curious why this needs to be the case? Seems so wild that it works this way, but I'm sure there's a logic to it.

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Re:Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoin... by pwg on Thursday January 08, 2026 @02:36PM (#46545423)

Read up on the Intel Management Engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

It began life as an "out of band" way to administer servers so that an ops. team could do everything (other than actual hardware changes) remotely that would otherwise need a person to be standing in front of the server in the datacenter poking commands into a keyboard.

It then grew in responsibilities to also support the "secure boot" aspect of system startup, and beyond some Intel CPU version point (I do not remember which point), it exists in every Intel CPU produced.

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Re:Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoin... by immibis on Thursday January 08, 2026 @12:48PM (#46544048)

Because

> it's always possible to just keep building on top of old bad designs, and so much cheaper and faster to do so

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Re:Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoin... by ChoGGi on Thursday January 08, 2026 @01:32PM (#46544639)

Cheaper to keep it then to fix all the bugs that may come from removing it?

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