> You shouldn't be remotely disabling hardware features

I don't know what current case law is but I think that ought to be explicitly illegal. A physical product should be required to maintain the features that it had when it was purchased. Anything else is clearly cheating the consumer.

Yeah, basically you'd trade uncertainty for the ability to remotely enable/disable hardware features not ready at launch I understand, which totally makes sense as a position, I probably agree with you. I think from AMD's side they like the option of being able to remotely enable things though, so new software updates in the future could be major releases enabling functionality that wasn't quite ready at launch. But, I suppose the uncertainty is the tradeoff here.

IIRC, this memory encryption function can let a hypervisor tell the platform to use different encryption keys for different virtual machines. So even if somehow a compromised VM managed to read data from a neighboring VM theoretically they'd get garbled, encrypted data.