After 10 years my old hardware finally shat it, likely motherboard or CPU failure. This puts me in a bind because all x86 CPUs made in the last seven years or so have had Intel ME or AMD PSP – I had hoped that everything would hold out until there was a nice solution to this. AMD seemed to lean towards opening up their firmware at one point but then cucked out, probably due to licensing bullshit or bio-luminescent Africans.
I could go with the AMD FX series for the time being for that appears to be the most powerful x86 CPU without such cancer, but that's still pretty old hardware and finding (spare) parts for it is not going to become any easier as time goes by. I have also heard good things about the PC Engines APU 1, but with 1GHz it doesn't seem like a great choice for a desktop, especially one that's going to run Gentoo. Running 4GB of RAM right now so 2GB would still be livable.
Let's collect other good options for a system that doesn't have a goddamn backdoor at the hardware level. x86 would be preferred for the occasional Windowns shitware, but it's not absolutely necessary. I've heard that (recent or at the very least many) ARM processors have comparable cancer so a simple "use ARM" would probably not be enough, it would depend on the chip. Might be misinformation though since I haven't seen details on it. Performance would definitely become an issue once we go to less common architectures however.
inb4 "just disable the backdoor lol", you are the only disabled one here if you believe this shit, even when "disabled" it's still on and required for booting – if your method wouldn't theoretically allow you to use the CPU with a nail driven through the "security" processor, it's not a solution to this problem.
