@ conscience - Re: Staggering
1. AMT, as implemented, was always a bad idea. As with UEFI, it has more to do with reclaiming control over a user's PC than any security measure—security is always the 'justifiable' excuse to take control away from the user. What Intel, Microsoft et al primarily want is to make the PC more proprietary and they have been doing so for years.
2. "I'm starting to wonder if there is anything they bothered to design correctly?"
You're correct. Look at Intel's record, it goes back decades. Now, we've not only Intel's AMT stuff-up but also the other big news that of the monumental problem of the 'Meltdown' and 'Spectre' chip bugs.
3. However, long before these fuck-ups there was the Pentium bug—remember that? What's fundamentally important to remember about the design flaw in the Pentium chip is that the very nature of the bug itself was the result of substandard and irresponsible engineering design—one that any first year engineering student could easily have pointed out.
The Pentium bug was in the ANSI/IEEE floating point standard subsection (the once 8087 IEEE math chip). Essentially, in order to speed up the chip Intel did the unthinkable, instead of implementing proper algorithms to do floating point mathematics as per the 8087, Intel took a shortcut and in part used a lookup table which was inherently prone to errors—and naturally calculation errors manifested themselves.
Whenever I think of this error I wince. It says much about Intel's deign philosophy which essentially put profits over data integrity. If Intel were prepared to commit such a cardinal design sin in the name of profit then we should be prepared to expect anything from the company.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
