That’s exactly what they are, but instead of connecting to a VAX at the other end of a modem they talk to a shell attached to a pseudo terminal device on the same machine.
25 years ago I worked at a university computer lab that was Windows-heavy because Dell wouldn’t stop donating PCs. However we didn’t have enough UNIX workstations as we had to pay for Sun / HP / IBM out of pocket. Converting them to Linux workstations would be nice because the Dells had more grunt than the aging RISC workstations.
I proposed to switch a few desks worth to Debian and was given the go-ahead. After a few days learning how to preseed an installation image and getting a PXE server going I had 8 machines running CDE just like the AIX and HP/UX boxes. Users that didn’t need one of the commercial engineering applications tied to one OS or another didn’t notice any difference between the free (now as in both speech and beer) Dells and the proprietary workstations.
A couple of months after we got the pilot rolling, the university’s IT director came to check it out and told me we’re on the “lunatic fringe” for deploying an OS developed by volunteers, but otherwise offered approval as long as we could maintain security and availability.
Now every student in our local school district gets issued a Chromebook running Linux under the hood. Who’s the lunatic now?
IME is even worse than that. It runs on a supervisor processor in the chipset that has privileged access to the memory, peripherals, and CPU, and can run when the rest of the system is powered off. IME is how Intel AMT can serve as a KVM-over-IP, and just because you don’t have a CPU with Vpro doesn’t mean all the components aren’t there for an exploited or backdoored ME firmware to remotely log your console or inject keystrokes.
There should be a setting in BIOS for sleep state that lets you choose between “Windows sleep” and “Linux sleep”. I know I have to set that to “Linux sleep” on my P14s gen 2 AMD or it wakes up immediately after going to sleep. Updating BIOS and the other firmwares might help too.
However I have a gen 7 from work running Windows that often fails to wake up from sleep or hibernation, and I have to resort to poking the reset button to get it to respond. Coworkers report similar troubles so I think it may be a cursed model.
That said, I’m running OpenSuSE Tumbleweed KDE on my P14s and an X1 gen 5. Everything works smooth out if the box on both machines except for the fingerprint sensor on the gen 5 which doesn’t have mainline fprintd support in any distro.
I never used Itanium, but I’m guessing that the Alpha workstations also ran x86 code faster than the Itaniums. fx!32 was one of DEC’s marvels that they completely forgot to market.