For those who just read the title: the "fuse" doesn't stop the cpu from working, it's just a flag for AMD support to know that the chip has been overclocked and this might invalidate the warranty.
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-psb-vendor-locks-epyc-cpus-...
You can see that economy on ebay. Those parts extend the life of existing boxes by years.
I'm typing this on a machine powered by parts from 'split' servers.
Refurb server parts market is more than alive, especially when a 5 year old server CPU is almost as good as a new one, but for $100 instead of $5000.
this used to be even bigger in the Xeon days. Being able to drop in a $50 upgrade to x99 and get the 2-3 best chip in socket owns actually. X99 isn't bad if you've got a 18-core chip running at 3.8 ghz all-core (with all-core turbo enhancement), and you can address 256GB of memory in a consumer board with dirt-cheap 32GB RDIMM sticks (they are basically under $20 now) since many X99 boards also support RDIMM (including on consumer cpus).
Like let's not cheer literal e-waste here. Secondary users keep hardware out of landfills, a lot of those customers have existing systems they want to upgrade or want to build using whitebox brands like supermicro/asrock rack, the EU absolutely needs to tamp down on this practice.
The most silly part is, how does locking it to the brand do anything anyway? If you locked the CPU to the board then sure, that makes sense, but the threat model here is an employee is stealing your CPUs and swapping them out with something cheaper, and this makes them... find another lenovo or dell branded CPU to match it with? and with PSP allowing secure manipulation of non-volatile storage, there is zero reason to make this a permanent fuse, why shouldn't you allow this to also be unlocked when it's time for disposal? like if you want to prevent the "evil maid" attack you would want it to be both more tightly locked to the board and also unlockable so it can be serviced.
(even if you don't want to trust non-volatile storage, you can also make "pseudo-non-volatile" out of plain old e-fuses. even number of fuses blown = unlocked, odd = locked. being able to lock and unlock say 128 times is plenty, in practice.)
And ironically the e-waste this produces (brand-locked chips) actually makes the cost of these evil-maid swapping attacks even cheaper, because nobody wants them on the secondary market, the cheapest platform-locked naples chips are probably already absolutely worthless because nobody wants naples to begin with, let alone brand-locked naples.
it so very obviously is narrowly targeted at making sure the secondary market is a confusing mess that buyers want to avoid. Creating e-waste to sell more chips. Again, the EU really needs to step in, it is noxious, they should even be forced to release a firmware update unlocking existing chips (AMD is the root of trust and can do this).
Sadly Intel has also really cracked down on xeon secondary sales as well - starting with broadwell, xeons can't be used in consumer Z97 boards, and they went to the same thing on X299, as well as cracking down on unlocked multipliers on certain skus (1660v3 has it, among others) and all-core turbo enhancement with broadwell-EP. It would be nice if you could drop an epyc into your threadripper board, too, that's basically the modern equivalent of ye olde xeon ebay upgrade. On the other hand, there’s no surprises either - socket compatible cpus are socket compatible, your board may only work with consumer chips but it does work with all of them.
And frankly people are also underplaying the fact that AMD does this on consumer socket as well - consumers would benefit from having a bunch of cheap zen2/zen3 chips from old OEM systems in a year or two here, that would push prices down even farther.
There is also a general danger that if the systems don’t have any resale value anymore that they will be scrapped entirely instead of resold as either parts or a complete server. If the value of the server is nothing, nobody will bother re-using it. You’ve literally turned working parts into e-waste, nobody wants them anymore and it stops being economically viable to bother for the handful of people who do. Everyone benefits from reduced friction in a market.
(I get your point though, I agree, it's very important for kids, especially in a world of increasingly walled gardens. A ton of the poorer world also makes do with whatever - X79 and X99 poverty builds are a real thing even today, because they're still a viable platform and china has cranked out cheap off-brand boards with resoldered chipsets. good workstation/server boards are <$200, and you can get a decent cpu for $50 or so, and memory for $20 a 32GB stick, it still is a relatively high-value thing for the capabilities it offers, if you need more than a normal consumer system.)
I was an early adopter and got bitten by it via a Lenovo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFNJVaO9E-o&t=215
not only is this removing a cheap source of upgrades for consumers and sending it to e-waste instead, but it's going to pollute the consumer secondhand market in the same way, once AMD starts getting more traction in OEM sales.
just like with epyc, you will need to wade through piles of "HP ryzen" and "Dell ryzen" and find the one that didn't list it as locked. Oops, still locked anyway, that seller just didn't list it properly.
people are gonna wake up one day and realize the secondhand market is completely fuckered, OEMs sell a lot more PCs to businesses than consumers, there is a disproportionate amount of volume that's going to be locked when things start getting parted out. Again, "fortunately" AMD didn't have much traction with OEMs during the AM4 years but AM5 is going to be a real mess.
If they did such a thing with car components, it would be shut down in no time. No different for computer parts.
Also a CPU that can be rendered permanently inoperable due to a software issue could be considered not fit for purpose and thus a defective product. Especially if it was intentionally designed this way - such that the CPU can self-cripple itself.
Maybe a legal firm would want to take up a class action against AMD for this potential product defect? Viruses and malware should not be able to physically destroy a CPU. There should be physical hardware protections against such destructive behaviour occurring due to a software induced logic error.
The PSP is not truly secure, someone should write a PSP eFuse bricker tool (Ryzenkill?) that can be run as a proof of concept to show the CPUs are defective, and then we can have a recall or free replacement of the CPU by AMD. I'll look into it myself - I need to ensure it's legal for me to write it from the country that I'm residing in right now. I personally have extensive experience hacking older AMD processors and GPUs through JTAG.
I'm sure it's still legal to provide a list of addresses and data writes that you need to perform to permanently brick the CPU?. I don't think that is classed as a "hacking tool". I can get t-shirts printed with it on, together with the words "AMD Ryzen CPU Self-Destruct Sequence". I don't think selling those would be illegal?
https://consolemods.org/wiki/Xbox_360:Disabling_the_eFuse_Bu... (see Method 2)