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Thank you Intel for disabling ECC capabilities on consumer grade CPUs. With smaller and more dense DRAM chips every year, it takes an even smaller amount of di
by fivesigma 11y ago
Thank you Intel for disabling ECC capabilities on consumer grade CPUs.
With smaller and more dense DRAM chips every year, it takes an even smaller amount of disturbance to flip a bit. ECC needs to go mainsteam yesterday.
- AnthonyMouse 11y agoAt least AMD is doing the right thing. Obviously the problem is that Intel has twice the single thread performance, but all modern CPUs are so fast that it's almost irrelevant. And on top of that most of the "actually needs performance" applications are being updated to use the GPU instead of the CPU anyway.
- witty_username 11y agoIf the application utilizes all the cores, then AMD is generally superior (performance/$)
- hollerith 11y agoare you including the price of electricity in your "$"? it usually costs more to power a CPU over its lifetime than it does to buy it, and Intel's been aggressively optimizing the Core architecture's performance per watt to prevent ARM from taking over on products where battery life is important.
- AnthonyMouse 11y agoI was curious so I actually measured it with a watt meter. AMD FX-8350 consumes ~39 watts at idle and ~180 at full load. Intel Core i5 (Ivy Bridge) consumes ~27 watts at idle and ~90 at full load. They both consume ~1 watt in standby. Also FWIW if you're holding onto an older chip because it's still "good enough" then you might want to think about upgrading to either of the above. Dual socket Intel Xeon 5160 uses 300 watts at the plug at idle.
- hollerith 11y agoThanks. Is this at the power rails on the motherboard or at the AC plug in the wall? ADDED. the "300 Watts" in your (added) second paragraph makes me strongly suspect that the measurements are from the wall socket / power cord. OK, so did you disconnect the power to any disk drives or graphics cards? Anything special about the power supply? (There are special, "green," extra-efficient power supplies.)
- AnthonyMouse 11y agoThis is at the plug using an AC watt meter. Incidentally FX-8350 has an internal watt meter that measures ~18 watts at idle and 125 at full load. I expect the power supply conversion losses you're after explain the difference between the two sets of numbers. Both hard drives were in standby mode (it reduces the power consumption by ~5 watts), though things like that should add the same amount to both systems and make no difference to the relative numbers. If anything I'm biasing against the AMD system because the i5 is using its internal GPU whereas the FX has a low end discrete GPU which I assume is adding five or ten watts to its numbers.
- witty_username 11y agoDepends on usage I guess, my CPU cost ($50) is ~4 months of the monthly electrical bill for the entire household. And I am doubtful the CPU even equals 5-10% of the electricity usage. EDIT: back of the envelope calculation Let's say my CPU runs 12 hours a day and uses 20 watts on average. So, over a month, it is used for 375 hours at 20 watts = 7.5 kwH which roughly costs about 1$.
- Osiris 11y agoI have an AMD Bulldozer CPU that was release in 2011 and it supports ECC RAM. I admit that I haven't used it. I assume Intel disables ECC in consumer CPUs to help prop up the prices of the Xeon models which are essentially the same CPUs but at a higher price point.
- frik 11y agoI had two RAM chip failures last year (notebook, PC). It took a while to figure out what the root cause of weird issues was (only one of several chips was faulty). Windows inbuilt RAM check tools failed to recognice the issue. Mem64+ CD found the defective RAMs - interestingly the memory chip inverted the data which caused weird side effects. The RAM is definitely more expensive than 3 years ago. I would prefer ECC RAM, sadly Intel prefers to deliver that vital function only to server CPUs (Xeon).
- hga 11y agoIntel sells a bunch of workstation oriented Xeons with built in graphics and of course ECC. This posting of mine is being written on a rock solid Ivy Bridge Xeon E3-1225 V2.
- frik 11y agoI know I have a workstation at work with a Xeon CPU and a cheaper i7 at home. Though, the Xeon is basically a i7 CPU chip with enabled ECC and a few other enterprise BIOS level features.