If it’s deliberate and not put back, there’s also the possibility the government made them remove it and not disclose why. So they can continue to access certain info and back doors and this security was giving them issues.
The government forced email providers to have a backdoor for them. It’s the NSA’s PRISM program. Been around since at least 2008.
YSK: This feature was disabled with a pushed firmware update.
Its true it was “not supported”, but the CPU was/is capable of it.
The big issue here is did AMD disable it accidentally, or did they do it intentionally. If it was intentional why did they not announce it anywhere in the update notes, or anywhere else?
Create the problem, sell the solution situation?
Or just enshitifcation?
what problem did they create?
The lack of memory encryption…
are you saying AMD is the cause why the implementers of the x86 architecture did not encrypt RAM memory from the very beginning?
No, that is not what I am saying.
The article isnt very clear on this, but did they actually remove a critical feature from already sold products? Surely they can be sued for that?
Eh, it protects against a certain class of attack when the attacker has physical access e.g. reading memory with memory probes while the computer is (still) on to get passwords etc., i.e. sophisticated attackers like customs, FBI. If they have physical access you’re probably hosed anyway, but if you have the presence of mind to shut the machine off (not sleep, hard off if needed) memory encryption becomes irrelevant.
It feels weird this was even ever a standard consumer feature. I wouldn’t even really expect it on enterprise hardware outside of servers. This feels like stuff you only really need to think about if you’re being directly targeted by a group with resources.
It seems like it is not a lot of overhead if any at all. Also the hardware design easily accommodates it. So why not if the work is already done?
There is still some overhead. Enough that if you are doing HPC and running on your own hardware you might want want to disable it.
I’ve disabled it on epycs for this reason but never touched it on ryzens.
that could be said about any and all kinds of encryption
I mean yeah maybe, this one is focused on protecting from threat actors with physical access which is kind of another level.
How’s that attempt to get back onto consumers’ good side again going for you, AMD?
I wonder if this is to reduce their value of being used as server CPUs.
