I’m in a rabbit hole trying to work out which AMD CPUs are spychip free. It’s non-trivial and looks like cannot draw a line and say all successor chips released after that line are spychips.

One rabbit hole begins with this 2014 AMD family:

“Kaveri” (2014) & “Godavari” (2015)

Which states:

“Integrated custom ARM Cortex-A5 co-processor[47] with TrustZone Security Extensions[48] in select APU models, except the Performance APU models.[49]”

This implies there are some Kaveri or Godavari CPUs that are spychip free. Footnote 49 links to this AMD sales pitch. Worth noting that someone on the coreboot project also found those same sales presentation slides interesting:

github.com/mikebdp2/coreboot-related/tree/master

Page 12 was cited in the footnote, which shows a claim that “Carrizo” (which describes a whole family of 2016 processors) is the “1st ARM TrustZone Capable Performance APU”. Yet 2013 is widely believed to be when the garbage came. Apparently the keyword is “APU”. If true, then pre-Carrizo (2016) APUs are spychip free, while conventional CPUs were enshitified as early as 2013.

So by extension, some would conclude that all the APUs listed for “Kaveri” (2014) & “Godavari” (2015) are spychip free. That is, the processes which include an embedded GPU.

No one has mentioned page 22 of that presentation, which states that an AMD A9-9410 which is based on “Stoney Ridge” (2016) does not have “trusted execution security”, which implies no PSP IIUC. Do I understand correctly? Does this mean a 2016 chip based on Excavator does not have the PSP despite Carrizo having it in APUs a year prior?

This article claims we must nix Kaveri and look for prior releases. OTOH, this article claims Kaveri is safe.

I am tempted to conclude that the APU half of Kaveri is safe. But there is another contradiction in Wikipedia. The Kaveri mobile processors are all APUs, and yet Wikipedia claims they are all: “Integrated custom ARM Cortex-A5 co-processor[47] with TrustZone Security Extensions[48]”.