Intel AMT / vPro - are older gen CPUs locked to older firmwares with buggy KVM?

[Gio]

I purchased a HP 800 G6 i5-10500 with vPro and have been messing around with it using Meshcentral/Meshcommander and finding a lot of problems getting the remote .iso mount to boot and let me install any OS. Are these issues common and expected? Running latest HP bios and intel ME firmwares v14.

I have basically have been forced to create bootable USB flash drives to get my installs going since I can't seem to be able to do this fully remotely from a few rooms away which is frustrating.

To make things worse my PIKVM does not seem to get its USB detected at all by the HP 800 G6 - I only get video and have to plug in an old school keyboard while using my macbook air to view the screen over Meshcentral... ugh.

Intel AMT versions - Wikipedia says that Intel AMT version 16 exists but the latest firmware available to my 10500 is v14 looks like... does v16 fix these bugs? and is it intentional that Intel does not give latest firmwares to CPUs which are not the latest gen? 10500 was released in 2020.

 

[jdnz]

To make things worse my PIKVM does not seem to get its USB detected at all by the HP 800 G6 - I only get video and have to plug in an old school keyboard while using my macbook air to view the screen over Meshcentral... ugh.

did you use the front or rear USB ports? We've had issues on that generation HPs where even a physical KVM doesn't work inside the BIOS when plugged into the rear USBs - we had to directly plug a keyboard into the front USB ports to get into BIOS/boot menu

 

[Gio]

did you use the front or rear USB ports? We've had issues on that generation HPs where even a physical KVM doesn't work inside the BIOS when plugged into the rear USBs - we had to directly plug a keyboard into the front USB ports to get into BIOS/boot menu

I didn't think it would make a difference but holy cow, this is the reason.

The only USB port that works with pikvm on this HP 800 G6 is the front right USB port (closest to POWER led). Thank you for the pro tip

 

[Gio]

this v16 does not fit your chipset.
look for latest v14 firmware/software/driver.

v16 is just for later chipset, v14 is still supported.

OK this confirms that chipset locks you down to a specific version of intel AMT.

So even if newer software updates or features come out for say AMT v16 (say its meteor lake) that older hw will stay in v14 or whatever track they are on.