Re: [gentoo-user] Re: New laptop - AMD or Intel?

[james]

On 3/9/20 2:53 PM, Michael wrote:
> On Monday, 9 March 2020 18:08:54 GMT Grant Edwards wrote:
>> On 2020-03-09, Mark Knecht <markknecht@×××××.com> wrote:
>>> Would that be the consensus of the group here?
>>
>> After decades of buying AMD, over the past 5 years or so all my
>> machines gradually shifted to Intel.
>>
>> So you can probably bet _that's_ not what you want...
>
> My thoughts on the same topic:
>
> I have not seen *laptop* OEMs offering BIOS/UEFI firmware updates (which would
> include any applicable CPU microcode updates) for any longer than 18 months
> from the day of releasing their laptops onto the market.

I cannot comment on the update/release cycle, but, I've been buying HP 
laptops, for decades, and never had any issues. About half are pure 
gentoo, the other half dual boot, some form of Windows and gentoo.


> Desktop MoBo OEMs
> are usually better, I've received firmware updates on ASUS MoBos for 5 years
> or so, with continuous improvements on stability and performance.
>
> If the laptop's MoBo firmware is flash-able with coreboot you're in (partial)
> luck.  You still need microcode binary blobs and for these you are at the
> mercy of the CPU manufacturers.  With the Intel debacle over the last couple
> of years I realised their interest to keeping us as customers is limited to <
> 5 years.

Absolutely spot on.


> Beyond that they expect us to throw our PCs in the recycling bin and
> buy their latest offering, which errm ... hold on!  o_O  As we just found out
> Intel's latest ROM offering is compromised straight off the production line
> and given their prior form I wouldn't think they would rush to recall and
> replace their borked hardware any time soon.


I only push the 'edge' when clients or employers are paying for it. The 
amount of work to get a gentoo install robustly happy, is orders of 
magnitude greater (imho), than the dollars initially allocated for 
hardware. So the robustness of long term usage, is the only issue for 
me; ymmv.

AMD is the least work, compared to a collective of embedded/ARM-64bit 
systems.  But this list could change that, in short order, if we 
collasce around a a list of packages, and semantics for easy to install 
gentoo on 64 bit arm systems.

Intel/nvidia sold their souls to satan, a long time ago, from my 
perspective as a christian, ymmv.


> Are AMD that much better?  They probably are, but not by much.


Orders of magnitude better, when you consider the total cost/pain of 
Install/Maintenance  of ownership.


> Both Intel and AMD are now only offering CPU/APUs with embedded OOB
> coprocessors (ME/PSP) and many of the vulnerabilities revealed over the last
> few years are caused by these backdoors at the heart of the PC.


It's orders of magnitude worst than you are alluding to.


> Since I don't feel comfortable running a machine designed to be controlled/
> controllable remotely before my OS of choice has even booted up, I am not keen
> on spending my money with either of these corporates.


Well, I'm afraid you have not fathomed the entire truth. Deep inside 
MOST RF chipsets, there are 'state-machines' and much, much more, mixed 
with 'multi-spectral' thin/noise communication channels to the 
governments of the top 10 countries and they do as they please, with 
your.......


The good news is they are not engaged with small fry, evil-or-good does 
not matter. But, others that discover their old technologies, are able 
to harass, steal and compromise most system in current usage.


You can make your networks, systems and operational semantics unique, so 
it is not trivial or worth the efforts to monitor you deeply. MS idiots 
are deeply comprised between their cell phones and windows system, to 
the point of no-return. Gentooers and a few other distros, can just make 
it a pain for the top-echelon of hackers, including nation states, to be 
bothered with your systems.

If you are 'evil': stay mobile, use multi-path and constantly 
trade/swap/buy new systems, registered to different buyers, as fast as 
you can. But those folks are rarely 'brought in' as when they are 
'caught'. They are most easily turned and release data to the agencies 
and government and top (billion dollar+) folks, routinely.


> At some point I'll look
> at saving up for a POWER9 workstation, which at least runs coreboot, but I
> have no solution at this stage for a laptop and not much hope Intel or AMD are
> going to change their design policy anytime soon.


Governments would not allow them to totally support honorable citizens 
of any nation. It going to take a US Presidential candidate that 'gets 
it' to step forward and change the swamp..... Trump is no saint, and 
he's clueless about technology. But he is trying to clean up a few 
things, and look at the discord that generates..... They are masters at 
deception, and multitude of intellectual/well-educated are also deceived 
by what's going on, they buy-in wholsale, rather that using a bit of 
intellectual robustness in that emotional belief. Just look at the 
climate noise.

Computer privacy is a FUNDAMENTAL RIGHT l just like non-metered access 
to the O2 in the atmosphere, but there is just to much profit, running 
the current evil system controls, that WE allow. To start with, just 
hold the board of directors and major share holders, accountable in a 
court of law for the costs of absconding  our bandwidth and the 
resulting costs and pain the average citizen endures, on a daily basis. 
It'd first take a constitutional amendment, in simpler language, for 
that sort of 'starting point'. I'd number it 1A, as technology human 
rights deserves as much legacy, and the legal centric rights, started 
back in the late Seventeen hundreds. WE now have the same oligarchs 
running the US,
as they have in Europe for thousands of years.

Uniqueness, via gentoo, is the best we have, atm. Start with a simple 
list of codes and a secure, minimized kernel. Sub $500 laptops, amd 
centric, could be the focal point, for this list of gentoo users.


hth,
James Horton, pe