AMI says its customers demand Trusted Computing BIOS

In reference to your article of 01/06/03 titled AMI introduces "trusted computing" Palladium BIOS Member of the Secret Cabal outlines its cunning plans, we would like to point out a couple of concerns with what was written.

Our AMIBIOS8, the product in question, was introduced to the market in October of 2001. It was designed as a modular offering allowing our customers the option of taking advantage of numerous technologies that we support but not forcing these choices by making them part of a locked package. Our support for TCPA has been designed in this manner. It is offered as one of our optional modules for customers requesting this support (as some have already done) but the final decision on who receives this is made by the OEM or other customer who is building the system - not AMI. As with most industries, it is only good business strategy to offer support for items that customers request.

AMI is a member of TCPA. Membership in TCPA is restricted to companies that have or will produce a product supporting TCPA-type security. This is outlined in the membership clause on their web site. Meeting that requirement, I believe that membership is free. You are correct in that the membership list is restricted from non-members (for reasons AMI does not know) but based on the membership list it does not seem overly exclusive.

TCPA architecture was designed by hardware vendors, OEMs and OS companies, AMI is only providing requested support as an option in its BIOS. Again, this decision is based on the wishes of our customers and potential customers.

The addition of TCPA does not significantly increase the boot times of our BIOS. All of our BIOS' are well under the specified boot times required by OEMs to receive WHQL certifications as specified by guidelines like PC2001 and its successors. As boot speed remains a critical competitive issue with our industry, we loathe to do anything that will be seen as a backward step in the advances we have made in this area.

Your assumption that TCPA is Palladium is incorrect. While there are certainly some overlaps in these technologies in future development, and they may assume a complementary position to each other, our design of TCPA support was done with no input from Microsoft in terms of its Palladium initiative. In fact, AMI had not been briefed by Microsoft when it began work on its TCPA support so any intention of cohesion with Palladium would have simply been the bi-product of the specification itself rather than a concerted effort on our part. I am attaching our TCPA implementation Whitepaper for further reference.

Mike, many of our engineers have been and continue to be ardent readers of the Inquirer and have followed your work since your time with the Register. With the understanding of the strict nature of deadlines (in this case we can't help but notice about 2 hours after our initial press release) and the difficulty in doing thorough research on a wide range of topics, we are happy to offer our assistance on any concern or question you may have. Feel free to contact us at any time for clarification or comment on issues we may have expertise in.

Sincerely,

Bill Clark
AMI

* EDITOR'S NOTE We're grateful to AMI for writing. The firm has also provided us with a white paper on its BIOS for TCPA which we will look at in detail later today. Yup, it seems AMI has little choice. Now who is going to give us the full list of TCPA members? We'd suggest the TCPA itself have a crack at a press release now... Mike Magee