How much are you willing to pay for it?

There's the Talos Secure Workstation, which has no such ME firmware (but costs ~$4.5k) [1].

A RISC-V desktop is pretty far out. There is an Arduino style microcontroller being made in silicon, though [2].

[1] https://www.crowdsupply.com/raptor-computing-systems/talos-s... [2] https://www.crowdsupply.com/onchip/open-v

Not really. They're talking Raspberry PI type devices based on RISC-V on the market by late 2017.

Source: MeetBSDCon 2016, update on RISC-V by the team who designed it.

Note that it looks like they may not make their goal. It ends on Dec 15th, and they only have about 10% raised ($344,310 raised of $3,700,000 goal)

It's only 32bit. This is not something I'm interested in funding. If it was 64bit or the 128bit version of RISC-V it would be more alluring.

Where did you read that? The TALOS machine uses POWER8 which is 64 bit. EDIT: Ah right there are two different links above

It's a microcontroller. Think ARM Cortex-M0.

If you're willing to pay more than you're able to, I think you need to reevaluate your approach to personal finance first.

Thanks, but I believe my approach to personal finance is quite right and responsible. This does not contradict the fact that there are things that I am willing to pay for, but not able to. Exactly because my approach to personal finance is responsible, I don't spend money in this situation.

I think we must understand the word "willing" differently.

It's more than just "some blob" though. ME is a system within your system, that is completely out of your control. [0]

[0] https://libreboot.org/faq/#intelme

A rootkit can be anywhere on the PCIe bus.

Just for example, you are using OpenBSD and full disk encryption and you think you are safe? What if the firmware on your NIC can be altered to scan your RAM (using DMA) and send the interesting data (big prime numbers, passwords, etc.) home? What if firmware on your keyboard can be modified (or pre-programmed in factory) to record the last x thousands of keypresses (which will include your boot disk password) on its own flash memory which can be later extracted? There are so many attack vectors.

This is one reason I do like the features of newer CPUs like amds Zen line with memory encryption. Combined with the iommu/vt-d features it should be possible to isolate a hardware device from reading all ram, just the buffers that it should be able to access. Thatll come with a performance hit (based on current hardware being used for VM gaming, maybe about 10%ish at worst) but it would be acceptable for security if that level of attack is something you want to guard against.

Aren't IOMMUs supposed to be able to prevent e.g., a NIC from having access to any RAM other than what the OS grants it?

RISC-V is Open Source.

Will the RISC-V based CPU in your computer be Open Source?

A parallel example is while WebKit is Open Source Chrome isn't

Correction: RISC-V is an Open Standard.

Of course there will be both proprietary and open implementations of RISC-V.

So what are the chances that you'll be able to get an open standard RISC?

Unlike software, you can't just download the code, you have to pay for a fab

Right now there are open implementations that have been taped out into chips and various open FPGA implementations, but nothing for sale. lowRISC seems like the most promising open RISC-V implementation for that.

http://riscv.org/ http://lowrisc.org/

Apparently they estimate there will be a Raspberry Pi equivalent for RISC-V in about a year (whole talk worth watching):

https://youtu.be/QTYiH1Y5UV0?t=39m20s