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It is good that AMD now look like they will finally be pushing Intel out of complacency. ECC should be the norm, not the exception and hopefully this will help

by Zenst 10y ago

It is good that AMD now look like they will finally be pushing Intel out of complacency. ECC should be the norm, not the exception and hopefully this will help drive the price of ECC memory down so that happens.

nolok 10y ago
Finally ? AMD used to always support ECC, I believe their latest consumer chips didn't but that was mostly because it was never used because most motherboards makers don't want to add its support to their non-server variants. Because why would they ? The very people for who that matters are those who have the needs and funds to buy the more expensive variant. Same reasoning as to why Intel isn't adding it to their desktop cpu.
- jl6 10y ago
  Enterprises are also professional cost cutters, so if AMD can provide enterprise-class features for less, then they will find a market.
  - masklinn 10y ago
    That's demonstrably not true, AMD has supported ECC more or less across the board since the Athlon64. Enterprises may be professional cost cutters, but before that they're professional ass coverers, otherwise Oracle would have died 20 years ago.
    - 8draco8 10y ago
      No one got ever fired for buying Intel Even if Ryzen will be twice as fast enterprise will still go with Intel. Unless some company with reasonable size (like DigitalOcean or Linode) will adopt Ryzen in their servers and brag about it.
      - LordKano 10y ago
        I suspect that Intel would offer hardware nearly at cost to convince them to do otherwise.
      - masklinn 10y ago
        > No one got ever fired for buying Intel Exactamently. Even if Ryzen has a way better performance/price ratio than Intel, it's a risk: * risk of losing favour with Intel or vendors (aka getting "renegotiated contract") * support risk * less coherent hardware risk * software compatibility risk Ryzen is lot of risk, and the reward is not huge because at the end of the day CPU is a pretty minor investment. Unless Intel completely fucks up a generation as they did with P4 few company will be willing to take that risk. Hell even then most companies remained on the Intel ship.
      - kogepathic 10y ago
        > No one got ever fired for buying Intel Even after the whole kerfuffle about Intel paying off OEMs? [0] They got some pretty huge fines for that. But in all seriousness, I think that if Ryzen can hit the perf/watt numbers of Intel, companies will seriously look at purchasing AMD systems again. Back in the NetBurst days, lots of people were buying Opteron servers because they kicked the pants off Intel. If AMD can prove their competitive with Intel again in the data center market, people will buy their chips. Competition is always good, even for large enterprise, and if the TCO of an AMD Ryzen system becomes on par with Intel, enterprise will happily pit them against each other in a price war. Enterprise will absolutely buy from both. [0] http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/23/technology/dell_intel/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/23/technology/dell_intel/index....
      - andrew53 10y ago
        Microsoft used (and still does) AMD CPUs for their first generation of Azure cloud instances. This did not do much in promoting AMD.
      - loeg 10y ago
        We are absolutely looking at buying large quantities of (Ry)zen, if the numbers work out. We're most concerned about multi-core / NUMA penalty compared to Intel. I assume we also get some sort of volume discount with Intel that may not be reflected in consumer pricing. But maybe we would get the same with AMD. Also, CPUs are a tiny tiny portion of our costs of goods sold. So in the end, it doesn't matter too much how expensive Intel is relative to AMD. That said, we would prefer to see competition for the long run.
    - chithanh 10y ago
      AMD does not support ECC on consumer platforms after AM3+. Socket FM1 through FM2+ are all incapable of supporting ECC. For socket AM1 there are reports that it may be ECC capable, however no actual products exist that implement this support.
      - lightedman 10y ago
        The socket can't support it, the processor most certainly can since the memory controller is built-in.

by Zenst 10y ago

nolok 10y ago

Finally ? AMD used to always support ECC, I believe their latest consumer chips didn't but that was mostly because it was never used because most motherboards makers don't want to add its support to their non-server variants. Because why would they ? The very people for who that matters are those who have the needs and funds to buy the more expensive variant. Same reasoning as to why Intel isn't adding it to their desktop cpu.

jl6 10y ago
Enterprises are also professional cost cutters, so if AMD can provide enterprise-class features for less, then they will find a market.
- masklinn 10y ago
  That's demonstrably not true, AMD has supported ECC more or less across the board since the Athlon64. Enterprises may be professional cost cutters, but before that they're professional ass coverers, otherwise Oracle would have died 20 years ago.
  - 8draco8 10y ago
    No one got ever fired for buying Intel Even if Ryzen will be twice as fast enterprise will still go with Intel. Unless some company with reasonable size (like DigitalOcean or Linode) will adopt Ryzen in their servers and brag about it.
    - LordKano 10y ago
      I suspect that Intel would offer hardware nearly at cost to convince them to do otherwise.
    - masklinn 10y ago
      > No one got ever fired for buying Intel Exactamently. Even if Ryzen has a way better performance/price ratio than Intel, it's a risk: * risk of losing favour with Intel or vendors (aka getting "renegotiated contract") * support risk * less coherent hardware risk * software compatibility risk Ryzen is lot of risk, and the reward is not huge because at the end of the day CPU is a pretty minor investment. Unless Intel completely fucks up a generation as they did with P4 few company will be willing to take that risk. Hell even then most companies remained on the Intel ship.
    - kogepathic 10y ago
      > No one got ever fired for buying Intel Even after the whole kerfuffle about Intel paying off OEMs? [0] They got some pretty huge fines for that. But in all seriousness, I think that if Ryzen can hit the perf/watt numbers of Intel, companies will seriously look at purchasing AMD systems again. Back in the NetBurst days, lots of people were buying Opteron servers because they kicked the pants off Intel. If AMD can prove their competitive with Intel again in the data center market, people will buy their chips. Competition is always good, even for large enterprise, and if the TCO of an AMD Ryzen system becomes on par with Intel, enterprise will happily pit them against each other in a price war. Enterprise will absolutely buy from both. [0] http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/23/technology/dell_intel/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/23/technology/dell_intel/index....
    - andrew53 10y ago
      Microsoft used (and still does) AMD CPUs for their first generation of Azure cloud instances. This did not do much in promoting AMD.
    - loeg 10y ago
      We are absolutely looking at buying large quantities of (Ry)zen, if the numbers work out. We're most concerned about multi-core / NUMA penalty compared to Intel. I assume we also get some sort of volume discount with Intel that may not be reflected in consumer pricing. But maybe we would get the same with AMD. Also, CPUs are a tiny tiny portion of our costs of goods sold. So in the end, it doesn't matter too much how expensive Intel is relative to AMD. That said, we would prefer to see competition for the long run.
  - chithanh 10y ago
    AMD does not support ECC on consumer platforms after AM3+. Socket FM1 through FM2+ are all incapable of supporting ECC. For socket AM1 there are reports that it may be ECC capable, however no actual products exist that implement this support.
    - lightedman 10y ago
      The socket can't support it, the processor most certainly can since the memory controller is built-in.