AMD Secure Memory Encryption "SME" Performance With 4th Gen EPYC Genoa

Out of 130+ benchmarks ran, only a small subset even had a statistically significant difference with AMD Secure Memory Encryption enabled for this AMD EPYC 9654 2P server:

The OpenFOAM mesh time having a 8% hit was the most significant (though just a two second difference from 25 to 27 seconds for the meshing, OpenFOAM execution time was not measurably impacted by SME on Genoa) or in-memory Zstd memory compression testing had a 6% hit, but for most of the real-world workloads impacted they tended to be in the 2~3% range or less with just a few exhibiting more of a performance cost to Secure Memory Encryption.

If taking the geometric mean of all 135 benchmarks run for this AMD SME Genoa comparison, the performance cost to running with AMD Secure Memory Encryption enabled was just about 1% lower than the out-of-the-box performance without SME.

So if you are interested in AMD SME for better securing the system memory especially in cases of multi-user servers or as part of Secure Encrypted Virtualization for virtual machines, the overall performance cost is rather minimal to small and similar to what I've seen with prior generations of EPYC server processors. It's a very small price to pay for the added security.