ME 9.1.0.1120 *required* for Intel Haswell Refresh CPU ???

Special Topics Intel Management Engine
1

A question to the ME experts in this forum. I was reading the documentation for the Fujitsu mainboard D3222-B (Q87, µATX, extended life cycle series). The cpu compatibility list for this mainboard shows on page 2 that you need BIOS >= 1.17.0 and ME >= 9.1.0.1120 to adopt a Haswell Refresh cpu on this board.

I’m currently running a Core i5-4590S (a Haswell Refresh launched Q2/2014) on a ASUS Q87M-E mainboard. Even the latest uefi version 1602 provided for this mainboard (dated 2016/05/27) is still using ME version 9.0.31.1487 (at least it’s the most recent ME 9.0 version). This ME version was introduced to uefi version 1102, the first uefi version that supports Haswell Refresh cpu’s on this ASUS mainboard.

So, my thinking was: chip set 8 <-> ME 9.0.x.x and chip set 9 <-> ME 9.1.x.x, right? Why do some chip set 8 mainboards have ME 9.0 and some 9.1? Could I upgrade this ASUS Q87M-E to ME 9.1 without bricking it? Would it make sense?

module_2.txt (10.8 KB)

2

8-series came with ME9.0
9-series came with ME9.1

8-series can be upgraded to ME9.1 to support HSWR
BIOS needs to be updated as well to work with ME9.1

If your mobo supports HSWR based on ASUS support list, then the BIOS should be ME9.1 compatible and thus you can use FWUpdate to upgrade to the latest ME9.1 firmware