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

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.

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 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.

AMD Memory Guard appears to be the only technical feature in “GuardMI” that wasn’t already present in non-Pro Ryzen 3000 CPUs.
AMD isn’t as explicit as it could be about “GuardMI”—but AMD Memory Guard appears to be the only feature not already present in regular Ryzen 3000 CPUs.
AMD supports Microsoft’s platform-independent encryption, authentication, and security features.
AMD wants to make sure OEMs are paying attention to their feature parity—and superiority—with Intel vPro CPUs.

HP’s EliteDesk 705 G5 Small Form Factor and EliteDesk G5 Mini will be among the first PCs to feature the new Ryzen Pro 3000 CPUs. The SFF desktop PC will be available with the Athlon Pro 300GE APU, the Ryzen 3 Pro 3200G, or Ryzen 5 Pro 3400G. The Mini offers the same selection, along with the Ryzen 3 3200GE and Ryzen 5 3400GE low-power variants.