Microsoft Reveals Pluton, a Custom Security Chip Built Into Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm Processors
Since there are Intel ME and Apple T2, there must be a Microsoft counterpart, too.
It seems that if we cannot learn how to forge our own hardware, we will soon be back to Iron Age tools.
Soon? I just finished building my first Pentium-classed processor out of wood, flint, and woolly mammoth pelts.
Mammoth pelts and flint? This is not Stone Age, we should all have access to libre soldering.
Roll on the Free Soldering Foundation.
EDIT: seriously, I sometimes wonder how much "liberable" computing power has been dumped in waste sorting centers or is gathering dust on various shelves. As a matter of curiosity, is it possible to "couple" CPUs and add up their power?
> As a matter of curiosity, is it possible to "couple" CPUs and add up their power?
Of course! It's called cluster computing. Used to be a big thing in the 90's and early 00's before cloud computing became so cheap and fast. It was a way to build your own mini-supercomputer for really cheap, like at a lab or a university. Linux was one of the first OS's to support clustering.
Good to know. I shall start my soldering crash course asap.
Dropping some coin on the HiFive Unmatched or a Talos II seems like a better idea every day.
> Talos II
That will have to be a huge coin.
"That will have to be a huge coin."
Indeed. I doubt it will be doable for me any time soon but in March I may be able to order me a Libre Tea Computer Card and a HiFive Unmatched. Would be nice additions to my free hardware stable.
In fact this is a very complementary option to the soldering path. Instead of gathering smaller units to combine their computing power, we could also gather coins and share the computing power thus accessible. I still need to figure out how this would work, in terms of ease of access for the unsuspecting average user. According to my experience in assisting the average user in their daily computing tasks, having to ssh into a remote machine sounds daunting.