Confidential Computing

Earlier this year, we wrote a news segment about AMD and Google’s announcement about bringing confidential virtual machines to the cloud using features enabled through 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors. At the time, AMD and Google marketed the announcement as the first commercially available cloud confidential VMs, powered through AMD’s Secure Encryption Virtualization feature. After writing up the news, I got a rather sternly worded email from IBM, stating that AMD/Google were not the first – IBM claims to have been offering confidential VMs to its client base for almost two years at this point. The difference I could find is that Google’s offering is more open-to-the-public, compared to IBM’s solution which is strictly more a B2B arrangement. Today AMD and IBM are combining their...