@Suiseiseki
>How does RYF endorse hardware if it "doesn't even mention hardware"?
Read it and don't try to spin my words without context to fit your narrative.

>There are hardware flags to toggle the base features like the resolution and framerate, but rather than providing documentation on how to do so, Intel provides proprietary software that toggles the hardware flags and tells you to shut up.

That's how most firmware initializes hardware. You load up firmware, run it, the firmware sets hardware flags usually by setting values in the hardware's memory space, pulls a few signals and presses the go button. At that point, the main processor for the specific hardware wakes up, usually with the new firmware already loaded and with the settings set by the flags. That's how your computer and many of it's other subsystems start up/bootstrap [1]. Of course they won't document hardware flags. What do you think all the magic numbers in the drivers for AMDGPU do? You are welcome to disassemble the firmware and with a custom lowlevel OS find out what the separate flags do. Just like Apple ARM hardware is being booted up with Linux.

>Virtualisation is a hardware feature and I have no proprietary microcode software
You are running virtualization without a lot of HW acceleration. I seriously doubt Intel VT-X and AMD-V run without microcode. And if they do, it's broken, because the microcode that is on the CPU die itself is weeks/months old even when the manufacturing starts.

The reason why it's semi-fast is because you are still running x86/x86_64 instructions on an x86/x86_64 CPU.

cc @dushman Literally sorry.

[1] EC detects power up signal->global reset signal->ME/PSP CPU init->CPU bring up into real mode->BIOS init from a set memory location->BIOS peripherals init->Boot loader/EFI binary->Kernel takes over control from BIOS->Protected mode->User space. In a very simplified fashion.