Just last March, at Intel's semi-annual Developer's Forum, the company presented EFI as one component of its Active Management Technology (iAMT), introduced as a program for implementing features such as storage virtualization and remote system management on the firmware level. Robert Hays, Product Marketing Manager for Intel, describes for us a hard drive failure scenario where iAMT and EFI take over. First, iAMT would shut down the system's access to the network, limiting the surface area of the failure to the local system. As the operating system becomes corrupted, EFI could attempt to recover the drive, while trying to report its progress to a system administrator. With the network shut down, EFI wouldn't get very far. So iAMT would respond with, as Hays describes, "network redirection of system resources, so that an IT person could remotely go in and access that PC. And then they could reboot it, and EFI would kick in, the BIOS would run [diagnostics], and a key person would remotely use diagnostic applications on that system." All this, despite the corruption of the OS.

The partnering of EFI with iAMT seemed innocent enough, but even some of Intel's own partners saw it as a signal of impending capitalization. "The thing I've learned about Intel over the years," says AMI's Brian Richardson, "is that everything Intel does is designed to sell a chip at some point in its life. It doesn't matter if it's a software initiative, hardware initiative, an initiative to enable a third-world country to manufacture a product. Intel is a chip company."

Acting in response to a request from AMD, AMI assembled, on very short notice,

It was precisely the implementation Intel intentionally enabled, and precisely the one it dreaded. It certainly de-coupled EFI from iAMT. And it ran on the dual-core x86 (x64) platform that had just knocked the thunder out of Intel's multicore plans that previous fall. "Not only [was there] no Intel silicon," says AMD's Richard Brunner, "there was no Intel source code in what AMI demonstrated." Suddenly the replacement for BIOS looked like it would wear a peculiar green logo.