Let’s open the hood. Before we dive into the shadowy world of the PSP, let's ground ourselves.
You’ve heard of the BIOS. But do you know about the miniature ARM computer hiding inside your AMD chipset? Introduction: The Second Computer You Never Knew You Owned When you power on your PC, you instinctively know the drill: the BIOS (or its modern UEFI counterpart) initializes your hardware, runs a Power-On Self Test (POST), and hands off control to your operating system. bios psp
Modern computing has traded absolute control for platform security . The BIOS is no longer the lowest level of your system. The PSP is. Let’s open the hood
You can disable certain features (like fTPM) in the BIOS, but the PSP itself is hardwired into the silicon. It is the first thing that executes on power-on. But do you know about the miniature ARM
The PSP is a . AMD provides the binary firmware, but the source code is a secret. Security researchers and open-source purists (especially the coreboot and libreboot communities) have a visceral reaction to the PSP.
The PSP vs. ME debate is basically: Which flavor of proprietary pre-boot processor do you distrust less? For 99% of users: No. The PSP works silently in the background, enabling Windows 11 compatibility, protecting against firmware attacks, and providing hardware-rooted security. You will never interact with it directly.
The only way to truly remove the PSP is to use an old, pre-2013 AMD platform (e.g., AM3+ with a Bulldozer CPU) or a non-x86 architecture (like RISC-V or POWER9). Even then, you lose modern performance and security features. If you’re an Intel user, don’t feel smug. Intel’s Management Engine (ME) is the same concept—an ARC processor inside the PCH that runs before your BIOS. In fact, Intel’s ME is older (2008) and historically more powerful (it has network access even when your PC is "off").
