Hi! “Binary blob purist” here! Yes, it bothers us that so much firmware is proprietary, but we are working to fix that :).
It is possible to have fully free firmware on certain select devices.
The silicon is unchangeable, much like a chair is unchangeable. So being concerned about changing it isn’t really productive. But, RISCV looks promising and a good remedy to the issue of not knowing what it does.
FPGAs would be nice but they aren’t powerful enough yet.
But, at the same time, unless the silicon can make outside connections itself or modify behaviour (a la Intel ME), or has been updated with what is essentially software baked into it that can change it’s behaviour on the fly, I’d say it can be trusted to do the computing you tell it to do and nothing more (again, excluding those processors where we know that it doesn’t like those with the ME).
Hi! “Binary blob purist” here! Yes, it bothers us that so much firmware is proprietary, but we are working to fix that :).
It is possible to have fully free firmware on certain select devices.
The silicon is unchangeable, much like a chair is unchangeable. So being concerned about changing it isn’t really productive. But, RISCV looks promising and a good remedy to the issue of not knowing what it does.
FPGAs would be nice but they aren’t powerful enough yet.
But, at the same time, unless the silicon can make outside connections itself or modify behaviour (a la Intel ME), or has been updated with what is essentially software baked into it that can change it’s behaviour on the fly, I’d say it can be trusted to do the computing you tell it to do and nothing more (again, excluding those processors where we know that it doesn’t like those with the ME).