Intel Active Management Technology

Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) is hardware and firmware technology for remote out-of-band management of personal computers, in order to monitor, maintain, update, upgrade, and repair them.Out-of-band (OOB) or hardware-based management is different from software-based (or in-band) management and software management agents.

Hardware-based management works at a different level from software applications, uses a communication channel (through the stack) that is different from software-based communication (which is through the software stack in the operating system). Hardware-based management does not depend on the presence of an OS or locally installed management agent. Hardware-based management has been available on Intel/AMD based computers in the past, but it has largely been limited to auto-configuration using or BOOTP for dynamic IP address allocation and diskless workstations, as well as wake-on-LAN (WOL) for remotely powering on systems. AMT is not intended to be used by itself; it is intended to be used with a software management application. It gives a management application (and thus, the system administrator who uses it) better access to the PC down the wire, in order to remotely and securely do tasks that are difficult or sometimes impossible when working on a PC that does not have remote functionalities built into it.

AMT is designed into a secondary (service) processor located on the motherboard, and uses TLS-secured communication and strong encryption to provide additional security. AMT is part of the Intel Management Engine, which is built into PCs with Intel vPro technology. AMT has moved towards increasing support for DMTF Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware (DASH) standards and AMT Release 5.1 and later releases are an implementation of DASH version 1.0/1.1 standards for out-of-band management. AMT provides similar functionality to IPMI, although AMT is designed for client computing systems as compared with the typically server-based IPMI.

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