A little more context as to when the engineer declined to continue the discussion:
Kilpatrick then brought up something especially awkward. He reminded Lendacky of a comment that the engineer had made back in 2020, confirming that a Ryzen 3700X, a consumer CPU, “should support TSME.” In a later 2025 comment in the same discussion, Lendacky again recommended using TSME, while noting that the motherboard BIOS provider had to expose the option. So there it was, AMD’s own engineer, years earlier, acknowledging the feature working on exactly the kind of lower-end chip now stripped of it, proving that Ryzen support was not some fantasy users invented.
After some more back-and-forth, Kilpatrick asked bluntly whether the flag being set to FALSE on consumer chips was a silicon-level limitation or a firmware policy decision — since one is permanent and the other is potentially reversible. Limonciello’s reply effectively closed the chapter. “My apologies, but I don’t have any more information to share on this topic,” he wrote.
To be fair to AMD, there is no clear indication that the company ever publicly advertised TSME as a consumer Ryzen feature. AMD has long said that a related memory protection, Secure Memory Encryption (SME), is available only in the Pro and EPYC CPU tiers. SME is OS-managed, using a single key and allowing the OS to selectively encrypt individual memory pages. TSME, by contrast, is firmware-managed, encrypting all RAM with no OS involvement.
Sounds to me like he had originally wanted to have it enabled for consumer CPUs, but some decision was later made to make this a feature only for higher end chips, even if lower end chips could technically support it. I can’t really blame the engineer for wanting to stop the discussion at this point. He’s most likely not the one making these decisions and the questions would be best asked to someone higher up.
Quick recap of what’s been happening recently: