The market segmentation arguments don't really work either, enterprises are paying the big bucks for more than just these standalone features.

My reasoning there is if you used an encrypted drive, the decryption key you type when booting up would be stored in memory for the duration of that boot.

This seems alarming because it means if someone broke into your living quarters they can bypass all forms of disk encryption if your machine was on and locked. Encrypting your disks seems like a reasonable thing to want to do with consumer grade hardware.

Whilst I hate companies paying engineers to make things worse just to segment their market; I am not really seeing this as an important feature outside the data-center? If an evil-maid has hardware access they hack the USB and/or PCI not the RAM surely?

The only mistake AMD potentially made here is not being transparent why it was disabled.

And there's been talk that now the so-called "AI companies" will start using more CPUs as well, due to "personal agentic agents", so I hope that people won't be priced out of CPUs too...

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.

should also set the MemoryOverwriteRequestControlLock (MorLock v1/v2) if you don't want it ever changed (on 'clean' reboot MOR is usually unset to facilitate a faster boot).

there is still the problem of actually triggering the reboot.

Too many people downplaying this as a simple business decision from AMDs side but the response here is what really makes this a story.

Where there's smoke, there's fire.

Everything is done silently and quietly nowadays.

Silent enshittification in the name of updates is getting out of hand. There are several evidences that downgrading BIOS/AGESA to below 1.2.7.0 to 1.2.0.3 brought back TSME for their AMD cpus.

I downgrade my bios as a price for my blind trust on AMD, and yes TSME is back.

You lost my trust AMD. The lesson learned is that if your PC with AMD cpu is stable, don't do any bios upgrade, as AGESA in the bios is adversarial to you, the users of AMD cpu.

This has implications beyond simply securing against physical access attacks, but also protects against rowhammer and its ilk.

Between this and their recent botched software update verification I'm getting a little wary of AMD.

But yeah 95% of the consumer market don't care about this and it's only adding unnecessary costs

Did anyone even use this feature?

Yes it is dishonest to remove features but from perspective AMD disabled a feature that never worked in the first place. The feature never should've been advertised as enabled.

Then AMD created their EPYC variants, and it wasn’t clear what the difference was between the consumer & Epyc models.

For most consumer users, RAM encryption primarily adds power consumption and heat generation while providing little practical benefit. They simply don't face many of the threat vectors and attack scenarios that certain industries and enterprise environments must contend with.