Ew. Why are all the chip manufacturers going along with this stupid plan? I want to buy a processor and then own it and have it work in my best interests, not consume electricity and generatie heat enforcing draconian 3rd party DRM policies.
The conspiratorial answers here are emotionally satisfying, but ultimately wrong. The reason chip makers and OS vendors are adding this is customer demand, by which I mean enterprises. Companies want remote attestation and guaranteed-immutable OS images on their networks, and I honestly can't say I blame them. In a perfect world they could have it and we could somehow firewall it away from the consumer space entirely, but that's not going to happen.
I don't really care for the reason, why can't we as consumers opt out if it's consumer oriented then? For me it's not even about the egregious security and privacy implications -- I just simply want the (illusion of) choice w/r/t silicon rootkit 'features' that I'll never use.
You can, it even says in the article that Lenovo and Dell are shipping with the Pluton chips disabled by default. If they can do it, a user can disable it to (for now at least).