AMD and Intel both have their share of proprietary blobs, in their "open source" packages, including microcode. Where do you see a secure path, for any computing, especially high performance?
> Where do you see a secure path, for any computing, especially high performance?
I believe POWER9 is the only modern option that doesn't use blobs? Of course that doesn't remove the possibility of hardware backdoors (nothing does, except maybe an electron microscope and a lot of free time), but that's a higher bar.
I do in fact have a Power9 workstation next to my desk, though sadly not in use as the biggest security wins for my workflow come from QubesOS which cannot run on Power9, yet.
People rightly disapprove of the AMD and Intel blobs and do what they can to disable or remove them, but at least those have stable interfaces that don't decay when there is a new kernel version. Basically every x86_64 processor ever made can run the latest version of the Linux kernel. Would that it were for Qualcomm.
Intel microcode is signed so you can't run open source microcode even if you were able to create it, and the microcode is encrypted so you can't reverse engineer it anyway.
On long obsolete AMD K8 CPUs, there was some work on reverse engineering the microcode back in 2017:
Not sure if the Broadcom GbE NICs they use require firmware. It would seem odd to me that they'd go so far as to include an open FPGA[0] for board management and system bringup to avoid closed firmware blobs, only to then rely on a network interface with firmware requirement.
