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

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Enlarge / Mmmmm, business-y. Don't expect to build your own Ryzen Pro 3000 system—the new chips are, sadly, only available to large OEMs. (credit: AMD)

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.

Model Cores/Threads  TDP Boost/Base Freq. Graphics Compute Units
 Ryzen 9 Pro 3900 12/24 65W 4.3GHz / up to 3.1GHz n/a
 Ryzen 7 Pro 3700 8/16 65W 4.4GHz / up to 3.6GHz n/a
 Ryzen 5 Pro 3600 6/12 65W 4.2GHz / up to 3.6GHz n/a
 Ryzen 5 Pro 3400G 4/8 65W 4.2GHz / up to 3.7GHz 11 CUs
 Ryzen 5 Pro 3400GE 4/8 35W 4.0GHz / up to 3.3GHz 11 CUs
 Ryzen 3 Pro 3200G 4/8 65W 4.0GHz / up to 3.6GHz 8 CUs
 Ryzen 3 Pro 3200GE 4/8 35W 3.8GHz / up to 3.3GHz 8 CUs
 Athlon Pro 300GE 2/4 35W 3.4GHz / up to 3.4GHz 3 CUs

From a more technical perspective, the answer is that the Ryzen Pro line includes AMD Memory Guard, a transparent system memory encryption feature which 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.

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