A company like AMD isn't going to be concerned with customer privacy and security unless it affects their bottom line. If the market was hostile to closed drivers and processor firmware no one would bother selling these types of systems because it wouldn't make sense financially.
The consumers have spoken: they're OK with trusting computer manufactures, software vendors, telecommunications carriers and governments. To me and perhaps other people interested in security that's unfortunate but to device manufactures, they're simply giving the market want it wants.
The customers were given no choice. Either upgrade to new hardware with closed blobs or fall behind your competitors.
AMD is in the unique position of having price competitive hardware (per core anyway) in a market where they have effectively zero market share. Big players are going to be switching anyway. If there's no technical reason not to open up the boot process then why not tack on the value add? A few million USD in engineer hours and in a few generations the server market might flip back towards the good guys.
I can see a situation where an entity demands having full hardware trust and even if Intel outperforms, the trust is worth it.
Even if AMD doesn't, and I wouldn't hold my breath, we'll likely see a smaller market emerge for open chips by way of RISC-V and the like.
The consumers have spoken: they're OK with trusting computer manufactures, software vendors, telecommunications carriers and governments.
Please be careful with statements like this! With the wrong speaker, they can justify all kinds of evils.
I'd be willing to wager some high 90s percent of people buying electronics don't even consider privacy at the hardware level because they don't even have the proper knowledge to have the mental state to ask those questions in the first place.
That does not mean that consumers are "OK" with it, any more than consumers care about dihydrogen monoxide in their food until they're told about it.
