Like the article hits spot on right at the start, it has nothing to do with needing to differentiate Epyc somehow and everything to with differentiating the PRO versions of the consumer CPUs:
> was suddenly no longer available on AMD CPUs outside the company's Pro lineup
The PRO variants are just the standard consumer CPU sold at a $ premium for enterprise targets. They have remote management firmware enabled, get longer firmware and support lifecycles, FIPS certification, and, now, memory encryption over the consumer branded version of the same CPU.
Consumer:
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/desktops/ryzen/90...
EPYC variant:
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/server/epyc/4005-...
>>Makes sense. The ECC in consumer line is what created an entire market for use in inexpensive web hosting. Then AMD created their EPYC variants, and it wasn’t clear what the difference was between the consumer & Epyc models. reply
"True" Epyc has always had a differentiation from the consumer line in the scaling+features, Ryzen PRO has always had a differentiation from the consumer line in the features, and "fake" Epyc 4000 has always had differentiation from the consumer line in the same way as PRO had/has.
Of all of the combinations, only the newer Epyc 4000 line compared with the pre-existing Ryzen PRO line have actually lacked differentiation from each other and this change in encryption support on the consumer line does not help with that.