I'm planning to splurge in the next few months on a new gaming computer that ranks as Excellent or Outstanding on the Logical Increments guide. That guide recommends nothing but Intel CPUs past the Great tier (two tiers below Excellent). Considering Intel's outstanding track record of cooperation with law enforcement and national security agencies, I'm having second thoughts about putting an Intel CPU on my computer.
That said, however, I'm not planning to use this computer for highly confidential matters. The only legally questionable use I intend for my new computer is pirated software and entertainment. I intend to dual boot between Windows and Linux, so my pirated software would be just Windows 7, Microsoft Office and a bunch of games. My pirated entertainment is saved on an encrypted hard drive so it's not even accessible under Windows. For day-to-day internet business that requires privacy I would be using Gentoo Hardened as I currently do, and for actually confidential stuff I won't even use an AMD64 computer, instead I plan on doing that on a single board computer hooked to an old VGA monitor.
Is that enough to not be fucked so hard by the botnet?
Unless you really need single threaded performance or newer instruction sets (like AVX2), the 83{2,5}0 is okay. Also, grow up.
Gabriel Campbell
The problem with Intel CPUs is the management engine, which is a hardware backdoor sold as a feature. As far as I know, AMD has something comparable.
Ethan Campbell
Very, due to Intel's Management Engine which is a signed update away from being a full hardware back door (2013 and on AMD processors have the same problem with AMD's Platform Security Processor). Which is even more worrying due to the US government's recent push to get a legal precedent for forcing companies to sign malware, with which hardware back doors implemented in that way would become standard for any hacking done by the government (given they'd need no additional exploits over other options, would be vastly more effective than other options, and would depend on security holes that won't go away unlike other options).
if anything it would be ARM shills. or that one raptor engineering guy, selling his overpriced POWER boards to freetards
Elijah Williams
Show me actual proof that this Intel botnet is "just a meme".
Juan Ortiz
the mainline AMD CPUs don't have it.
Joshua Clark
Yes, they do. It's called the Platform Security Processor and it has been included in all processors since 2013.
Owen Jones
He said CPU, not APU. AMD hasn't made any CPU since a long time now.
Carson Morales
I'll have to check again, but I thought I read something a while back about the Vishera line including it. I know all the new Zen processors will.
Oliver Howard
Checked again and the answer is iffy. The Trinity APUs supposedly have the Platform Security Processor and those came out in 2012 a couple months earlier than the Vishera CPUs started coming out (both based on the Piledriver architecture). Articles from the time period also talk about AMD not being completely clear about which chips have the PSP. Hopefully I can find information one way or the other, as I really don't want to build a new computer with a ridiculous potential back door.
Luis Green
Just get some quad core clocked at 2.8 to 3.0ghz. You don't need to buy the newest of the new regarding CPU's, the bottleneck anywhere is going to be the graphics card. On the Holla Forums side, I would strongly advise against blowing a large amount of money on a computer for games. I'm not seeing any promise of redeemable, intensive games being released outside of Deathwing and you're probably going to be spending the better part of a grand on this. My advice would be to get an Athlon II quad + a graphics card from the last five years + other components and put the rest of your budget toward a car or savings or something. Also, the way you're talking about computers in tiers sounds like your judgement's being clouded by e-peen and you have no idea what you're buying. Please beware.
Robert Torres
Jewtel CPUs have been backdoored out the wazoo since ~2006.
The latest, most powerful line of CPUs without innate backdoors is the AMD Piledriver line. My custom desktop exclusively runs Hardened Gentoo on an FX-8370E, and it works majestically.
Aiden Reed
This user is right, as far as backdoors go you're pretty much fucked on that one unless you want to build everything yourself.
Also if I'm not mistaken while many Intel CPUs have IME some of the older ones need it enabled with a software patch, so there's that option if you must have Intel.
OP here. Guess this means I'll get an AMD Piledriver.
What I'm very much worried about is that in the future, when I have to compress a 4 TB full disk backup, I'm going to have to do it on a botnetted Jewtel CPU because my AMD Piledriver is going to become obsolete within 5 years. I regularly have to work with gigantic backups well above the 100 GB of usage and the Piledriver series being probably the last series of un-botnetted CPUs means that any kind of heavier processing will require me to bend over to the botnet so I can have a CPU capable of handling increasing volumes of data.
And let's not talk about the simple task of everyday web browsing. Today's websites have so much fucking Javascript and are so fucking heavy that you need a powerful CPU just to load an ordinary website without bringing your computer to a grinding halt as it struggles through those 10 MB of Javascript and HTML5. If this AMD Piledriver CPU is the last unbotnetted CPU, that means in 10 years I'm going to have to bend over to the botnet just to be able to keep browsing the web without trouble.
Also, due to software bloat, in 10 years you're going to fucking suffer if you want to install Gentoo on an un-botnetted CPU.
I'm thinking about setting up in the future a computer dedicated exclusively to CPU-intensive tasks like building Gentoo or compressing files without any kind of wireless connectivity, only linked to an old computer via Ethernet, but I'm not sure for how long am I going to be able to keep it up.
Eli Wood
...
Kevin Murphy
With everyone worrying about the Intel Management Engine and AMD's equivalent in here, what do you guys do for graphics cards? Considering all modern graphics cards as far as I know also have a flashable closed source BIOS with no FOSS alternatives and to my knowledge PCI-E devices in general have direct access to your computer's RAM. It seems to me that modern graphics cards would allow for the same hardware backdoor issue as Intel's Management Engine and AMD's equivalent.
Jaxson Jenkins
they literally have a microphone listening to you at all times as long as the PSU is plugged
I sure hope they like to hear a fat man fapping away his days.
Samuel Gomez
if you have chromium installed, pretty much
Angel Gray
CMT architectures works exceptionally well on integrer parallelizable workflow. There are problems with current engines (especially Gecko), but Servo's gonna fix this shit.
John Powell
is there anything preventing this architecture from becoming a capable desktop processor in a few iterations? Disregarding gaming stuff, I just want something with enough power to do operations on massive collections of files or contribute to network projects like I2P or IPFS or something. Granted I wouldn't complain if something like a single board computer like an rpi or beaglebone decided to make a desktop sized board with room for ram and pci slots and whatnot, but I'd be comfortable with something that's only as powerful as a laptop from five years ago as long as there's no hardware backdoors and it can run a free OS.
