IntelME in community recommended laptops

NovaCustom and Purism have the new Intel CPUs, but I thought the intelME was not supposed to be removed for the newer CPUs?

Intel ME has been discussed many times on this forum:

Intel ME - real threat for ordinary persons?

Intel vs ARM vs Power vs Risc-V (Architecture Freedom perspective)

Also, there are very few community-recommended computers at the moment. If you remove all with Intel ME, you will have even less, and they all would be quite old.
Also, Intel ME cannot be removed indeed, but at least it is disabled in Librem 14 and can be disabled in NovaCustom.

1 Like

To make it short and simple. Intel ME is present in all intel CPU starting from the early 2000s. In Core2Duos it can be completely removed, but not so in the core i-series. Core2Duo is pretty much obsolete by now and all official certified Hardware uses modern i-core-CPUs, starting from the 3th gen up to the 14th. There we have a soft disable (neutered) and the HAP-bit (disabled).

If the ME has to be considered in your threat model, you still have some AMD-options in the HCL. But bear in mind that AMD is much less researched than Intel.

1 Like

Moderation note: I edited the title slightly to avoid unnecessary sensationalism for a topic thatā€™s neither a recent development nor new to this forum.

3 Likes

@novacustom laptops have IntelME disabled. There is a distinction between removing and disabling. Disabling IntelME is the best thing we currently have that allows us to use modern CPUs without IntelME spying on our activities.

They donā€™t.

1 Like

Our laptops have an option to HAP disable the Intel ME. May I ask what makes you think that they donā€™t?

2 Likes

I mean that Intel ME is not disabled by default, as you explained in the linked post. I said above that it

Itā€™s a big difference in my view, because most people do not know about Intel ME. And I would not expect them to need it for anything.

When you are ordering a novacustom NV41 laptop, you can select ā€œDisable Intel MEā€. And then, they will ship your NV41 with Intel ME disabled.

2 Likes

On modern laptops, you canā€™t use S0ix suspend when you disable ME. For most people, disabling ME would just leave them with a worse performing laptop.

2 Likes

Has anyone read the novacustom site even slightliy? Source: NV41 Series 14 inch coreboot laptop - NovaCustom

ā€˜In addition, modern standby (S0ix) is affected: suspend mode consumes about 3 times more energy than with ME enabled. You can workaround this issue by setting up a suspend-then-hibernate policy.ā€™

With Heads the ME is disabled by default and with EDK-II thereā€™s a selection screen somewhere within the BIOS, accessible by any layman.

You canā€™t hibernate on Qubes currently.

1 Like

For the default EDK-II version, you can select S3 suspend-to-RAM, and itā€™s set by default for the Heads firmware variant. The battery draining issue only applies to S0ix modern standby, NOT for S3 suspend-to-RAM :smiley:.

1 Like