> It will be good to run some tests against the Purism 15 motherboard, at least to evaluate the dormancy/presence of the Intel ME via publicly known interfaces.
The ME is required to be able to boot contemporary Intel devices. It's required to do power management for years. There is no way they ship a device with Intel CPUs and no ME.
What they can do is ship a system without the AMT/vPro features that are implemented in ME firmware. The difference being if the firmware for that part of the chipset is 2MB or 6MB. If you want to know what Intel requires 2MB of firmware for a chip that isn't supposed to be very active, I have no idea either.
But given that the 6MB firmware supports intercepting USB (for keyboard and mouse) and the GPU to route them over the network interface for the soft-KVM feature, be aware that the chip has these capabilities in hardware, no matter the firmware. It just doesn't use them (or so Intel claims).
The ME is required to be able to boot contemporary Intel devices. It's required to do power management for years. There is no way they ship a device with Intel CPUs and no ME.
What they can do is ship a system without the AMT/vPro features that are implemented in ME firmware. The difference being if the firmware for that part of the chipset is 2MB or 6MB. If you want to know what Intel requires 2MB of firmware for a chip that isn't supposed to be very active, I have no idea either.
But given that the 6MB firmware supports intercepting USB (for keyboard and mouse) and the GPU to route them over the network interface for the soft-KVM feature, be aware that the chip has these capabilities in hardware, no matter the firmware. It just doesn't use them (or so Intel claims).