A Sub-$1000, Non-X86 Motherboard (hackaday.com)

There was a previous submission on this recently. Thomas (?) from raptor was hanging out in the comments. I’m wondering about how complete the auditing of the entire thing is/can be. There are a lot of chips on a mobo that handle all kinds of important signals, what reassurance is the user given about all these chips? And if I understand correctly, ibm does not declare anywhere the existence of a me equivalent in these cpus but how can we be reassured that they haven’t placed one without announcing it? Or some other kind of back door? Sorry if this question seems super dumb.

And also, I want to broach the subject of software security. Having perfect hardware is pointless if you install a bug-ridden os and then browse the web with a contemporary web browser. I would really like to see software that lives up to hardware like this, like redox and a new kind of simpler browser.

How does this compare to the cost of an x86/64 mother board of similar specs? I think there's a cost angle to be played here - of the actual components are common/agnostic to architecture, a compelling value proposition is the ability to run most apps at the performance of an x86, at lower overall cost

Last sentence: "RISC architecture is going to change everything." -- why should RISC vs CISC change something in respect to additional "features" built into the CPU such as Intels IME? I would in fact be surprised if the ARM processor manufactors didnt start building similar stuff into their CPUs.