The downside of disabling it is the chance of bricking your expensive silicon, as the drivers to it are mysteriously inaccessible to the operating system, but I literally can’t think of anything else to add once it’s already down. It’s not-end user facing, there’s no API for it, it’s basically just there to be a firmware back door for the NSA and possibly extremely skilled foreign hackers. It doesn’t affect the actual processing layer of the chip at all IIRC.
What's the downside of having it disabled?
The downside of disabling it is the chance of bricking your expensive silicon, as the drivers to it are mysteriously inaccessible to the operating system, but I literally can’t think of anything else to add once it’s already down. It’s not-end user facing, there’s no API for it, it’s basically just there to be a firmware back door for the NSA and possibly extremely skilled foreign hackers. It doesn’t affect the actual processing layer of the chip at all IIRC.
To the average user: literally nothing.