...So, what's it doing in Intel chips? A lot. These processors are running a closed-source variation of the open-source MINIX 3. We don't know exactly what version or how it's been modified since we don't have the source code. We do know that with it there:
-Neither Linux nor any other operating system have final control of the x86 platform
-Between the operating system and the hardware are at least 2 ½ OS kernels (MINIX and UEFI)
-These are proprietary and (perhaps not surprisingly) exploit-friendly
-And the exploits can persist, i.e. be written to FLASH, and you can't fix that
In addition, thanks to Minnich and his fellow researchers' work, MINIX is running on three separate x86 cores on modern chips. There, it's running:
-TCP/IP networking stacks (4 and 6)
-File systems
-Drivers (disk, net, USB, mouse)
-Web servers