Comment by hnuser123456
13 hours ago
You would need to go back to ~2005-era Intel x86 CPUs to have x86 without a backdoor baked into the silicon (as far as we know), like Pentium 4. The Core 2 / Q6600 / P35 chipset already had an early version of it. Wikipedia says AMD added their equivalent, the Platform Security Processor, around 2013, so their best CPU from 2012 would be the FX-8350.
I mean technically there's nothing they can do that SMM couldn't - introduced in a revision of the 386. It's code running with system permissions invisible to the "parent" user code and OS.
You're already pretty much trusting the same people then as now, at least if they are "actively malicious".