Do companies ever announce when they remove features and degrade products?
AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
201–210 of 225 posts
Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 o…
> 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 th…
You've never read the "errata" section of a CPU manual have you?
Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
#203This 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.
Additionally, if you look at the changelogs for old ABL, it seems like this policy decision (only supporting for PRO SKUs) has always been implemented in firmware:
https://github.com/amd/firmware_binaries/blob/main/cezanne/P...
AFAICT the situation here is, it should have never been enabled for these consumer parts in the first place.
Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a patch called Tresor that did this, but I don't think it was updated for a long time. You have to store the encryption key in CPU registers and ensure it's not saved to RAM during task switching or power suspend operations. Tresor used x86-specific debug registers for it, but you could potentially use unused SIMD registers if you masked-off the CPUID bits for them and disabled them for access by user-space…
Realistically as an Europeans we have the security threat of backdoored components from Epstein's colleagues at five eyes which are used for mass-surveillance of VMs at European hosters such as Hetzner. And every time you add a configuration option like memory encryption it makes their drive-by mass surveillance a tiny bit more difficult and hopefully easier to detect for the sysadmins at Hetzner. IMO using the speci…
I’m not sure what the featured article has to do with Europeans? In any case, not only are the vast majority of people not in Europe but surely Europeans (in any sense of the word) are not the primary groups targeted by a “hitler salute” in the US.
Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
#205It'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.
I think intel tried to offer GPU virtualisation with their consumer offerings but not sure what happened to that.
Older Intel iGPUs used to support GVT-g, they got rid of that in the newer models.
SR-IOV ("true" GPU partitioning) is targeted at the Arc Pro/DC GPUs only, not the desktop variants.
That leaves Intel in the same boat as the others these days: you can either pass the whole GPU through or buy a non-consumer variant for proper hardware virtualization (or try to hack it).
Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
#206Do companies ever announce when they remove features and degrade products?
Yeah.
Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
#207Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
#208Hint: NSA said no.
AMD PSP probably already works around it anyways.
Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you didn’t pay for it though did you. The subscription is foul but the manufacturer choosing to streamline manufacturing by only having one variant restricted with software if you don’t pay is not particularly bad or surprising. Plus, easy to hack it back in, so win win
It’s a bit of double dipping then: the streamlined production makes the seat cheaper, and people who subscribe further increase the margin on the heated seat. I really don’t understand the subscription model applied to a physical piece of equipment that has no digital maintenance overhead.
But the streamlined manufacturing is still more expensive than no heated seats. So someone needs to pay for it. There are two reasonable options 1. charge everyone a bit more by including it as a standard feature 2. charge only some people significantly more so that only the people who find heated seats worth it pay the cost.
It isn't double dipping, in no scenario does it make sense to physically make two models, it is more expensive for no gain. The question is just how you charge people for it.
(Now subscription seems like an awful model, but a paid upgrade for some people makes sense to me)
Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs
#210This, like the fluctuations in ram prices, feels familiar.
I wouldn't be surprised if lower hardware prices and weaker demand for everything are more likely to lead to more feature rich products to encourage sales, and higher hardware prices hurting sales volume leads to a natural/expected contraction in feature availability to compensate for lower sales.