The entire point of the mandated minimum requirements was hardware that had silicon level mitigation support for Meltdown and Spectre type attacks. Something that impacted both AMD and Intel CPU's and still has new variants popping up (we're on what, Spectre v4 by now?)
The only way to truly mitigate these issues (other than undoing 30 years of CPU advancement) was an entire top-to-bottom set of mitigations. From the silicon up through the operating system and even applications such as browsers
I roll my eyes even further back when knowledgeable people pretend to not understand that the endgame for TPM/Pluton/etc is DRM, censorship and privacy violations.
Forcing hardware obsoletion in favour of those "hardened" platforms has two benefits, as far as certain groups of interest are concerned:
- turning existing machines into ewaste, so people buy new machines, so the money making wheels keep turning for hardware manufacturers
- normalising stronger "trusted computing" (in the Plutonium/DRM sense) capabilities, which is of course a concern for a number of groups interested in controlling what will be running on your machine.
Make no mistake, it appears that Doctorow's article on the war on general purpose computers is becoming more and more compelling as the time goes on. Some of us see forced obsolescence of older machines with weaker "security" norms as a part of that fight - on the side of the enemy.
IMO, undoing/re-thinking the last 30 years of CPU progress might just be the thing we need. We need to re-examine our foundations and fix them.
Why doesn't Microsoft explain exactly why they require new CPUs, what in TPM 2.0 they're using that's not in 1.2, etc.
Do you even realise how diluted this sounds? I’m all for watching corporations closely, but the tale you’re telling is simply wrong, and I hope you know that, even if it sure is tempting that you might know better than the rest of the world…
