I am beyond sick of this "security" justification being used for everything. At the end of the day, the only thing really being secured are the greedy vendor's profits.
So if I wanted to modify my car to unlock performance that's usually OK and certainly has been considered moral for decades. But if I wanted to unlock a core in my Ryzen CPU, or just hardware hack my GPU (Radeon Vega and above) to make it do neat tricks, I now technically risk a FELONY because of the PSP encryption and the DMCA - even though I want nothing to do with cracking copy protection. That is enough to have a chilling effect and prevent neat stuff from being released.
AMD have gone as far as signing the BIOS* on their recent GPUs, so tweaking it may be technically illegal (assuming you could crack the signature, though)!
This is unprecedented, nobody ever risked a potential felony for wanting to look inside their car to see how it works, or modifying their household appliances.
We need to get together (on Twitter and other social media) to fight this and let consumers know what is happening, because if people did, especially the more technically minded enthusiasts/gamers, that would put pressure on AMD and others to stop.
Specifically for gamers, let them know it's likely a FELONY to unlock a core in their Ryzen CPU or Radeon GPU due to PSP crypto. Just as with the ink cartridge recyclers who have been prosecuted for breaking cartridge chip security.
* = Radeon Vega and later GPUs have a Cortex-A5 PSP which runs autonomously, executing the Trustonic TEE from the SPI BIOS chip at boot, once the signature has been verified. Yes a whole DRM operating system running on the GPU - if you want to see for yourself, take a Radeon Vega or later BIOS and run binwalk -e to extract the compressed TEE.
But yes, its really shitty how the downsides end up with the loss of user control and ewaste. Especially when it is possible to design something that is secure and that the user controls.
It surely makes sense for phones as it makes less profitable to steal them (as you could only sell parts of the phone and even that can be blocked). Maybe even for laptops but not for desktops and servers.
You pointed out all those factors to say that they're reasons why CPU OEMs should be able to make all your dreams about price, quality, speed, open hardware come true?
Makes perfect sense.
(Since I know you're not getting a x86 license that's an easy call for me - I know for sure you're unable to tap into that market)