alt Hacker NewsHow 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.
Replies
They always had control. Awareness is a different thing. You could just as well ask "if you've written every line of code, why did you write that bug?".
You choose every piece of food you eat, how do you not know all the macros?
AMD has limited control over what motherboard manufacturers do. And there have been plenty of examples demonstrating motherboard vendors don't fully understand what they are doing. Stuff like shipping builds with example/placeholder keys, ridiculous voltage settings which destroy the cpu. Even if motherboard vendors don't have full control to configure to freely change every flag, they probably have access to some kind of debug/development firmware which has a lot more features enabled than what you would have in consumer builds.
AMD, historically, has taken a "we don't test enterprise features on consumer SKUs, but we don't fuse them off if you really want to qualify it or let them try it" approach to e.g. ECC on consumer chips with Zen.
So it's quite possible they were doing the same with TSME, and either made a rude marketing decision that the people using it on consumer chips would probably pay for PRO chips if they were prevented from doing so, or kept getting people attempting to RMA the chips for a feature they never said worked on them not working, or there's some systemic flaw in the consumer chip's implementation that they didn't feel like trying to qualify fixing versus just killing the not-guaranteed support.
Hard to guess without more data than just them going silent about it.