AMD Ryzen Pro 3000 series desktop CPUs will offer full RAM encryption

Peter Reutemann <[email protected]> Thu, 3 Oct 2019 11:26:54 +1300
Newsgroups gmane.org.user-groups.linux.waikato
Message-ID <CAHoQ12JNgMS-4y9oMDVpWYhPqedpmwabC2Md6NrAXsA49L0bzA@mail.gmail.com>
'Monday, AMD announced Ryzen Pro 3000 desktop CPUs would be available
in Q4 2019. This of course raises the question, "What's a Ryzen Pro?"

The business answer: Ryzen Pro 3000 is a line of CPUs specifically
intended to power business-class desktop machines. The Pro line ranges
from the humble dual-core Athlon Pro 300GE all the way through to
Ryzen 9 Pro 3900, a 12-core/24-thread monster. The new parts will not
be available for end-user retail purchase and are only available to
OEMs seeking to build systems around them.

From a more technical perspective, the answer is that the Ryzen Pro
line includes AMD Memory Guard, a transparent system memory encryption
feature that appears to be equivalent to the AMD SME (Secure Memory
Encryption) in Epyc server CPUs. Although AMD's own press materials
don't directly relate the two technologies, their description of
Memory Guard—"a transparent memory encryption (OS and application
independent DRAM encryption) providing a cryptographic AES encryption
of system memory"—matches Epyc's SME exactly.

AMD Memory Guard is not, unfortunately, available in standard Ryzen
3000 desktop CPUs. If you want to build your own Ryzen PC with full
memory encryption from scratch, you're out of luck for now.'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/amd-ryzen-pro-3000-series-desktop-cpus-will-offer-full-ram-encryption/

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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