Technology

A little more context as to when the engineer declined to continue the discussion:

Kilpatrick then brought up something especially awkward. He reminded Lendacky of a comment that the engineer had made back in 2020, confirming that a Ryzen 3700X, a consumer CPU, “should support TSME.” In a later 2025 comment in the same discussion, Lendacky again recommended using TSME, while noting that the motherboard BIOS provider had to expose the option. So there it was, AMD's own engineer, years earlier, acknowledging the feature working on exactly the kind of lower-end chip now stripped of it, proving that Ryzen support was not some fantasy users invented.

After some more back-and-forth, Kilpatrick asked bluntly whether the flag being set to FALSE on consumer chips was a silicon-level limitation or a firmware policy decision — since one is permanent and the other is potentially reversible. Limonciello’s reply effectively closed the chapter. “My apologies, but I don’t have any more information to share on this topic,” he wrote.

To be fair to AMD, there is no clear indication that the company ever publicly advertised TSME as a consumer Ryzen feature. AMD has long said that a related memory protection, Secure Memory Encryption (SME), is available only in the Pro and EPYC CPU tiers. SME is OS-managed, using a single key and allowing the OS to selectively encrypt individual memory pages. TSME, by contrast, is firmware-managed, encrypting all RAM with no OS involvement.

Sounds to me like he had originally wanted to have it enabled for consumer CPUs, but some decision was later made to make this a feature only for higher end chips, even if lower end chips could technically support it. I can't really blame the engineer for wanting to stop the discussion at this point. He's most likely not the one making these decisions and the questions would be best asked to someone higher up.

I bet it's because something good!

👨‍🚀🔫👨‍🚀

I think that’s the crux of the article. The feature was there on some chips but not supported. A new update now prevents access to the feature.

Ryzen "Pro" too (their business line).

what problem did they create?

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.

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.

They did a Trump Administration “We’re good on OpSec.”

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?

that could be said about any and all kinds of encryption

Did you know they even had this feature before today

I don't think DDR5 has any encryption built in? Maybe you're thinking of the error correction controller that's on the module now? Memory with inline encryption is not very common, and as far as I know, not actually very secure if the CPU/TPM isn't the one holding the encryption key.