So my PC runs 5% slower because someone could break into my house to get physical access to decrypt memory? OK sure, but not my top concern, and a bad tradeoff for the lost performance. And not only fair, but completely accurate to describe TSME as non-critical for *most* consumer desktops. I'd go as far as to say useless and counter-productive for most, but not all, consumer desktops.

If the bad guys have physical access to my consumer desktop, I'm already well and truly fucked.

The last few companies have all had desktops in datacenters with the local PC just a virtual terminal.

You'd need physical access while it is running as the target is using it.

And it does reduce memory speed by about 0.5-1%.

I think it's more the principle. CPU firmware upgrades are not supposed be used for things like this, and if it became normal to use them for removing features, it would just lead to people not updating the firmware at all, and that's not a good scenario for anyone.

Physical hardware products shouldn't lose features after launch. If this was a "mistaken" feature which they suggested it was they should have disabled it on future chips.

Judging by the Reddit threads I saw, A LOT of people were upset even though it was clear that they had not idea what the feature actually provided beyond “encryption”. I’d guess that the majority assumed that the change would result in them basically having to “encryption” in affected AMD devices any more in some vague general sense.

The encryption/decryption is done in the memory controller so it doesn't matter where the access is coming from.

There are many ways it can work depending on the cpu:

1. No dma, instead you use bounce buffers and the cpu manually encrypts and decrypts on behalf of the pcie

2. The IOMMU sets certain pages as unencrypted and ensures the pcie only accesses those pages and that part of ram alone is now not encrypted.

3. Newer pcie devices use the TDISP(handshake) and IDE(aes gcm hardware module related stuff) protocols to do encrypted communication with the CPUs PCIe root hub, where this functionality is called TIO i.e trusted io on amd and TX connect on intel. As far as nvidia GPUs go which is where I have used this, H100 onwards have the feature. Only server xeons and turins etc support this feature on the cpu side. I think some server SSDs do too. Here you get full encryption full DMA at full bandwidth.

> and also recently broke and fixed setting manual speed on DDR5 memory with ECC enabled (basically any setting higher or lower than 5200mhz or something was ignored).

Do you know when this was fixed? I recently updated my B650D4U and ended up stuck at 5200MHz instead of 5600MHz. Asrock Rack don't seem to take every update, but I have had luck getting beta releases in the past when I've asked about specific versions.

> I wonder if this was also something they just accidentally broke

Their statement suggests it was a calculated decision, reversed after public backlash. I greatly appreciate they listened to user feedback, but they shouldn't have done it secretly to begin with.

> Based on valuable community feedback, we will reinstate this option in an upcoming BIOS release in July.

We're talking about a company that five generations into its processor family still hasn't been able to figure out how to have USB work properly and reliably.

AMD Adrenalin, their software that manages things video/GPU features like clip saving, performance settings, game optimizations, update monitoring, performance overlaying, etc - is so fucking bad that if your mouse is set to a refresh rate over 500hz, it is virtually unusable because the mouse cursor takes half a second to respond to inputs. This is running on a card one step down from the flagship, current generation.

Don't even get me started about ROCm on Windows.

I wish we'd stop pretending that non-ECC ram is ok on any platform.

Sure, as long as your OS is written in Rust (and doesn't use any unsafe)