Very easy to grasp, AMD the old competitor to Intel, now beginning a return to mainstream as Intel slips into darkness, announces new CPUs, among which capabilities are the ability to encode/decode data using hardware rather than software :

extrait : " (...) The new Ryzen Pro chips all come with a dedicated security processor within the CPU, allowing for more thorough and powerful protection.

This includes a secure memory encryption service which is entirely managed by this dedicated processor, meaning the CPU doesn’t have to contribute resources to the built-in AES 128-bit encryption engine. (...) "

AES-128 is weak enough to ensure that NSA isn't losing sleep about it.

Even worse, the standardization of encoding and decoding of data, in other words the fact that everyone would use AES-128, is what is the worse.

A weak algorithm isn't bad as long as everyone is using a DIFFERENT weak algorithm because NSA has to pay the price of decoding such thing PIECE by PIECE. But if NSA can assume that every encoded data is using AES-128, then the NSA can get back to their automated black boxes to decipher the data.

So when AMD announcing about the same thing that Intel for hardware encryption, this spells trouble for those of us worried about our privacy.