AMT is designed to help sys-admins remotely manage PCs out-of-band when PC power is off, the operating system (OS) is unavailable (hung, crashed, corrupted, missing), software management agents are missing, or hardware (such as a hard disk drive or memory) has failed.
[1][2][3][4][5] Intel AMT is built into a small secondary processor located on the motherboard.
This OOB controller has embedded firmware that runs on the Manageability Engine (ME), a separate small processor built into the northbridge (or network card for AMT 1.0) of the motherboard.
New major releases of Intel AMT are built into a new chipset, and are updated through new hardware.
The following is a comparison of the various features supported by each version of Intel AMT[13][14]