AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs

lompad

Any idea what's happening? This sounds _bad_.

ZiiS

If it can be silently removed was it a security feature? Whilst I hate companies paying engineers to make things worse just to segment their market; I am not really seeing this as an important feature outside the data-center? If an evil-maid has hardware access they hack the USB and/or PCI not the RAM surely?

rekttrader

Hint: NSA said no.

garganzol

For what it's worth, RAM encryption belongs to professional SKUs. It's the right business decision that should have been made from from the very beginning. For most consumer users, RAM encryption primarily adds power consumption and heat generation while providing little practical benefit. They simply don't face many of the threat vectors and attack scenarios that certain industries and enterprise environments must contend with.

miga

It is sad that once again we will be exposed to more criminals trying to steal our data. Memory encryption not only allows to secure memory from physical "cold RAM", but also prevents loss of encryption keys as it hides the content during transfer.

thg

This was never marketed as a feature of the consumer CPUs and if some malignant actor does get physical access to my (consumer) hardware, then them being able to read out bytes through cryo-freezing the RAM really isn't high up on the list of things I'm going to worry about.

Elfener

I would be fine with this if it meant CPUs became slightly cheaper, but we know that's not going to happen. And there's been talk that now the so-called "AI companies" will start using more CPUs as well, due to "personal agentic agents", so I hope that people won't be priced out of CPUs too...

shiiiit

This will be re-added in a few years. The current flip-flop is just enshittification.

k__

I'm curious about Denuvo's opinion on that.

bflesch

It's a shame there is no software-based memory encryption included in the linux kernel. Especially cloud providers can easily snoop all your keys and you have zero recourse.

Integer

I had this enabled as it protects against RAMbleed/ECC errors, so it's not limited to physical attacks.

pjmlp

Another example on how AMD is hardly the good guys.

rusk

I wonder what the additional power draw of these features would be. Parenthetically, I wonder often about the energy impact of all these HTTPS localhost links, and is there a point where defense-in-depth has to give way to other concerns? But yeah 95% of the consumer market don't care about this and it's only adding unnecessary costs

pshirshov

To be honest it never worked great - many issues (mostly freezes) with VFIO, NVidia drivers, amdgpu...

crest

AMD is busy learning all the wrong lessons from Intel.

hgoel

It's pretty crazy that we have this entire segment of features that companies artificially restrict from the average person and overinflate the price of, for no real reason. GPU virtualization is another example of such a feature. The market segmentation arguments don't really work either, enterprises are paying the big bucks for more than just these standalone features.

nickdothutton

This sort of shenanigan is why it’s important to have a competitive market for CPUs.

nickjj

I don't know how this works but does this mean if someone gained physical access to your locked running computer, they could gain access to your full encrypted drive and anything saved on disk? My reasoning there is if you used an encrypted drive, the decryption key you type when booting up would be stored in memory for the duration of that boot. This seems alarming because it means if someone broke into your living quarters they can bypass all forms of disk encryption if your machine was on and locked. Encrypting your disks seems like a reasonable thing to want to do with consumer grade hardware.

ciupicri

From yesterday: "Users cry foul after AMD stripped memory crypto from its consumer CPUs", https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/06/users-cry-foul-afte... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48559827 )

sva_

So it seems that the Ryzen PRO in my HP EliteBook is not affected.