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themafiatoday at 8:38 AM4 repliesview on HN

> To be fair to AMD, there is no clear indication that the company ever publicly advertised TSME as a consumer Ryzen feature.

A feature that was possibly accidentally enabled on consumer chips is now being disabled. I would guess that the number of owners of consumer chips who also relied on them for encryption is exceedingly small.

The primary concern persists. The manufacturer has an exceptional amount of control of the state of your CPU most of which you cannot change and an unknown chunk of which you cannot even see. We are sort of playing in a fools paradise.


Replies

willis936today at 8:49 AM

How can manufacturers simultaneously have exceptional control over flags and not enough control to know what flags are enabled on their shipping products?

They either have that control or they don't.

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AussieWog93today at 10:24 AM

> I would guess that the number of owners of consumer chips who also relied on them for encryption is exceedingly small.

I guarantee you that there's one small company that put 1,000 of these chips in a server room or datacentre though, and they're now completely boned.

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Ygg2today at 9:08 AM

To be fair same can't be said of ECC, even though ECC should be basic feature out of the box.

vfcliststoday at 10:38 AM

> A feature that was possibly accidentally enabled on consumer chips is now being disabled.

Bro what are you smoking? The highly paid and experienced engineers designing these chips could have "possibly enabled" the feature on consumer chips.

The chips were designed with the feature as it is cheaper to do everything right from the get go and disable functionality rather than design a less capable chip then tack on the feature afterwards, just as the consumer versions of Windows are the server versions with functionality removed.