Comment by cridenour
7 years ago
I'm really excited about the software side of Purism but I can't justify buying a 2 year old processor on the laptop at a price still more expensive than alternatives, especially since that refresh happened in the last few months.
The CPU choice is restricted by their ability to disable Intel ME. If you don't care about that, you probably don't care about what Purism is trying to achieve, so it's not for you.
If that was true, they would be using AMD or ARM. Seems to be a matter or price/stock only.
AMD also has this feature, (AMD Platform Security Processor), but unlike Intel ME, there's no way to disable it at all, currently.
As for ARM, they have it too, (TrustZone), the performance is nowhere near what x86 gives you and arguably even less free/open than x86 and developers aren't really focused on it.
What about Platform Security Processor and Trust Zone? Few CPU's lack a hardware rootkit now.