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]”.
Mnem667@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Do you have some credible source for the “spy chip” claim?
Peasley@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
i assume they mean this: en.wikipedia.org/…/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo…
Mnem667@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Yeah. I am just curious about the implications. There’s been a couple of vulnerabilities reported and patches, but anything that would indicate “spy chip”? I would normally assume some security researcher would have said something by now.
evenwicht@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
“Spy chip” is not a claim. It’s nomenclature. I am referring to the PSP. You don’t have to call it a “spy chip” if you don’t want. You can call it “friendly alternate control mechanism”, or “helpful nanny”, if you want.
So from there, what is a credible source for language, when the language is English? It’s not like Academy Français, which officially recrognizes words in the French language. English is more chaotic. If a lot of people are using a word or phrase, journalists will use it. If journalists are using a word frequently, maybe Oxford dictionary or Marriam Webster will add it to their dictionary. If you are American, you may not consider Oxford dictionary credible. And if you are British, you may not consider Webster’s dictionary credible.
Mnem667@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Well, my apologies for not being hip to the lingo. I appreciate your enthusiasm, but damn. I just wanted to know if there was some nefarious thing about the PSP that I had not read about yet.
Instead I get a a diatribe of self indulgent sarcasm.
So I suppose the answer is “no”. It’s just a scary black box that could potentially be a source of some data collection or used as a backdoor, but no one in the last 8 years has published any such papers.
Now I am aware, and my curiosity is sated.