The headline is a little misleading: the feature has disappeared from consumer chips but AMD is not responding when asked why. As the article itself says: it’s not clear if this is a deliberate decision, or a bug that has caused this issue.
The headline implies it was a deliberate action. Maybe it was, but at the moment we don’t really know. But it is good that Toms Hardware is writing about this and drawing attention to this issue. It’s concerning regardless of the reason, and it’s also concerning how cagey AMD is being about addressing this issue.
I bet it’s because something good!
They did WHAT???!!?
They did a Trump Administration “We’re good on OpSec.”
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?
Tom’s is trash and should be banned. The original Ars article it mentions is better: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/users-cry-foul-after-amd-stripped-memory-crypto-from-its-consumer-cpus/
Sounds like it was never really supported, but available. With the new BIOS update it’s no longer available.
If that’s the case, AMD shouldn’t have problems saying so. Although it’s still a very bad move from their part.
I suspect lawyers are involved.
Probably. Also PR to limit damages.
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.
That is not correct. Data can persist in RAM even when powered off, especially if the sticks are frozen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack
Ah, thanks, I stand corrected. Still a good practice.
Isn’t that attack only viable within minutes of a machine being powered down? That seems like a huge caveat…
TIL. Thanks.
It’s funny how every big tech decision these last few years all sound like a shitty James Bond villain step in a shitty world domination plan, with shitty corpo writing.
Hold up, since when did consumer Ryzen CPUs have memory encryption support? I was sure that was always a EPYC exclusive feature.
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.
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.
What the fuck AMD?
Did you know they even had this feature before today
Is this different than the ddr5’s memory encryption?
