zlacker

There are open processor designs, e.g. many SPARC designs are published. You could run a reasonable webserver or what have you on those. But only the mega-corps chipmakers are going to be competitive with the current state of the art, and the mega-corp chipmakers are going to include ME or equivalent because their mega-corp clients want it.

More generally if the processor's going to have any dynamic internal logic then that has to run somewhere. Frequency scaling, wake-on-lan, microcode updates... you probably do want an ME-style embedded management processor that runs the processor's firmware just as you would for any other peripheral (hard drives, wifi controllers and so on all contain their own embedded ARM cores these days). ME itself isn't the issue - having what runs there be open and inspectable is.