AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization Came From Work on Consoles

According to Forrest Norrod, Senior Vice President at AMD for Data Center and Embedded Solutions, AMD’s work on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 led to the development of the Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) feature for the company’s EPYC servers. Norrod believes that SEV will become a must-have feature for data center companies in the coming years."I think that it in three to four years, it will be ridiculous to even consider deploying a VM in the cloud if you can't control and isolate that thing cryptographically from the cloud provider.”AMD started developing SEV when it was working on semi-custom chips for Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4, both of which launched in 2014. Norrod noted that the previous console generations were easily hacked, so console gaming piracy was rampant."Previous generations of the game consoles could be hacked, and so you could go down to probably any number of places within a 10-mile radius [and] buy a 4-terabyte hard drive [with] every PlayStation 3 game ever written on that hard drive.