"...this is interesting is because POWER9 is basically the first time the public got a real view of how sophisticated the backstage cast actually is of a modern server CPU."
Not quite correct; the OpenSPARC T1 and T2 were publicly released and available by 2008.
>Not quite correct; the OpenSPARC T1 and T2 were publicly released and available by 2008.
Points for mentioning this! But things have come a long way since 2008. You can get Intel ME-less machines from the 2008 era. Not sure if OpenSPARC T2 has any management cores.
>The maintainers of the me_cleaner script likely have the clearest view of what is known.
Yep, absolutely. Much of what we know is thanks to the efforts of researchers like these. See also the talks on finding the 'Red Unlock' mode of modern Intel CPUs.
Not quite correct; the OpenSPARC T1 and T2 were publicly released and available by 2008.
https://www.oracle.com/servers/technologies/opensparc.html
"Large parts of this process are handled by vendor-supplied mystery firmware blobs, which may as well be boxes with “???” written in them.
The maintainers of the me_cleaner script likely have the clearest view of what is known.
https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner