Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) is hardware-based technology built into PCs with Intel vPro technology. AMT is designed to help sys-admins remotely manage and secure PCs out-of-band when PC power is off, the operating system (OS) is unavailable (hung, crashed, corrupted, missing), software management agents are missing, or hardware (such as a hard disk drive or memory) has failed.

Versions

Intel AMT is built into a small secondary processor located on the motherboard. This OOB controller has embedded firmware that runs on the Manageability Engine (ME), a separate small processor built into the northbridge (or network card for AMT 1.0) of the motherboard. The AMT firmware is stored in the same SPI flash memory component used to store the BIOS and is generally updated along with the BIOS. FWH (Firmware Hub) or LPC firmware storage is not supported for AMT. In general, an AMT version can be updated in software to the next minor version. New major releases of Intel AMT are built into a new chipset, and are updated through new hardware.

Comparison of AMT versions

The following is a comparison of the various features supported by each version of Intel AMT