Reply to post: Re: [Citation needed]

Wanna exorcise Intel's secretive hidden CPU from your hardware? Meet Purism's laptops

Sandtitz Silver badge
FAIL

Re: [Citation needed]

"Deny all you want."

Dear AC, you haven't paid attention when you watched the video. Your original quote was this:

"...they were surprised to find a wifi modual under there besides the normal chip. So, either as an undocumented side and failed design, or an actual hidden system, there was wifi where there should not be."

In the 100-minute video the presenters say it was a PIC32 microcontroller (12"30') , and the interesting part you are referring starts at 42"10' when they mention about the surprise of finding a 'radio chip', but the presenter immediately added that it was there legitimately - perhaps because he checked the specs afterwards.

That 'radio chip' was not a Wi-Fi module, nor did the presenter say so. It is probably a very low-power RF transmitter in the Megahertz class built into the microcontroller, but since I didn't catch the exact PIC model they used I can't say anything else about it. Except that it wasn't Wi-Fi, and it very likely was documented and a working design.

"Apple or Intel or Samsung are both competitive enough or stupid enough to forget what they have in a chip"

They're not that stupid. I recall an AMD presentation perhaps here in ElReg, where the lecturer told about how CPUs are built and tested. When new features are added they may not work properly in the finished package so they are disabled and the microcode needs to do those operations in the more generic silicon parts which always incurs a speed penalty.

Intel at least has presented plenty of CPU revisions and microcode updates for the CPUs to circumvent some off hangs and miscalculations, and this I believe is just general knowledge.

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