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From the reddit AMA today with Lisa Su (CEO): 7th) Will all Zen products have all of the instruction sets and platform extensions, or could lower end chips los

From the reddit AMA today with Lisa Su (CEO): 7th) Will all Zen products have all of the instruction sets and platform extensions, or could lower end chips lose features like virtualization? A7: In the consumer client space we have no plans to turn off virtualization or features. 9th) Does AM4 / consumer ZEN support ECC memory? A9: ECC is enabled on Ryzen and AM4. [https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...] edit: added link

simplemath 10y ago
my homelab is ready.
- chx 10y ago
  Really not wanting to poop on anyone's parade but an off lease Dell/HP/Lenovo workstation used from eBay will beat the pants off anything else for homelab. You can get an E3-1240 V2 with 8Gb RAM for the kingly sum of ... $200. Including motherboard, chassis and PSU.
  - aroch 10y ago
    And you're also stuck with a $200/month power bill and the full home heater.... Don't get me wrong, I have a bunch of rack pull servers and they're great for the price but I colo mine for less/server than the power bill/server would be at home and have them ona faster connection. I stick with low power options for light in-home usage
    - simplemath 10y ago
      ding ding ding
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      The single-socket Xeon E3 that GP mentioned is 69W TDP. The Ryzen 1700 is 65W, while the 1700x and 1800x are 95W. Why do you think the Ryzen box will be a lot less power hungry?
      - smallet 10y ago
        The Ryzen 1700 has 8/16 and much better performance compared to the mentioned Xeon E3. I think the Ryzen 5's would be the ones to look out for (still more cores and much less price), hope they push the power consumption even lower.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - DCKing 10y ago
        It doesn't matter what the TDP is. Home systems like HTPCs and home servers will run at their full power a very small amount of the time they're running. That means their maximum power usage (which is what TDP is supposed to indicate) does not matter. Modern processors do some clever tricks to minimize using power if it is not needed, and have gotten progressively better at it. For home use cases, it's often worthwile to spend more money to get newer or otherwise more efficient PC components. This is especially true in areas where electricity costs are higher (e.g. average price per KWh can be almost twice as high in the Benelux when compared to the US). One thing to get an indication about how good a CPU/chipset is is idle power usage of a system. It seems Ryzen is even better at this than Intel's already excellent Sky/Kaby Lake architectures [1], possibly because of the fact that Ryzen motherboards contain fewer components. On the contrary, the Ivy Bridge architecture of the chip mentioned by the parent cannot be considered competitive from a power consumption perspective, despite still being a great performer. [1]: https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-Review-Now-and-Zen/Power-Consumption-and-Conclusions https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - nagvx 10y ago
    Could you offer some specific, searchable product names?
    - chx 10y ago
      http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z220-SFF-Workstation-E3-1240-V2-QC-3-40Ghz-8Gb-1Tb-DVD-RW-Windows-7-Pro-I-/391718183147?hash=item5b343920eb:g:xMYAAOSw44BYi9N7 http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z220-SFF-Workstation-E3-1240-V2-Q...
  - mrb 10y ago
    "beat the pants"? Compared to Ryzen, E3-1240 V2 has: half the cores, half the L3 cache, half the memory throughput of Ryzen, no AVX2, etc. Plus average price is more like $300-350 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerEdge-R210-II-1U-Rackmount-Server-E3-1240v2-CPU-250W-PSU-/191818994654?hash=item2ca94d93de:g:QaMAAOSwZG9WjaOJ http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerEdge-R210-II-1U-Rackmount-... And it's still comparing apples to oranges favoring Intel. Wait a few months and compare used Ryzen gear to that old Intel gear...
    - chx 10y ago
      Check price per performance please. And I said workstation, not sure why everyone is looking at rack servers? http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z220-SFF-Workstation-E3-1240-V2-QC-3-40Ghz-8Gb-1Tb-DVD-RW-Windows-7-Pro-I-/391718183147?hash=item5b343920eb:g:xMYAAOSw44BYi9N7 http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z220-SFF-Workstation-E3-1240-V2-Q...
    - psandersen 10y ago
      Depends on your needs, dual socket xeon servers can be had with huge amounts of ram if you shop around. E.g. I got an IBM 3650 m2 with 2x L5640 and 128gb of ecc ram for $200. For my needs (heavy data processing on a budget) its been awesome.
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    You can get used amd workstations too its not really valid to compare the cost of used 5 year old machines vs new.
Unklejoe 10y ago
Link to the comment of the CEO of AMD confirming that Ryzen supports ECC memory: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/def58sv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
- BayesStreet 10y ago
  For anyone looking at a new AM4 build with high speed memory, be warned that Linus' review stated he could not POST with memory clocked past 2666MHz[0] [0]https://youtu.be/9wJQEHNYE7M?t=4m43s https://youtu.be/9wJQEHNYE7M?t=4m43s
  - jrockway 10y ago
    Is this uncommon? I have a 6950X with some "3200MHz" RAM, and it definitely doesn't work reliably at that speed. Nothing above 2666MHz will pass stress tests, even with conservative timings. Ultimately the memory clock speed doesn't affect performance very much, so I'm not sure it matters.
  - AlphaSite 10y ago
    It's very motherboard dependant (and on prerelease BIOSes. Although if the issue lies with AMD or The motherboard maker we shall see later.
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  Isn't the problem with AMD mobos that it's very difficult to find a motherboard manufacturer that supports the ECC? From what I've been reading about the upcoming Ryzen, no motherboard so far claims to support ECC.
  - Unklejoe 10y ago
    It has sort of been that way in the past, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar issues with Ryzen at first. However, I expect that there will eventually be some workstation grade motherboards from vendors like Supermicro which will be more direct about guaranteeing ECC support. This will be especially true if AMD decides to release some “official” small server grade CPUs on the AM4 socket (kind of like Intel’s Xeon E3 which uses the regular consumer socket, but requires a different chipset). I don’t know if there are any plans for such a CPU from AMD, but it wouldn’t surprise me considering there’s probably some real demand for something a little less expensive and powerful than the 32C/64T Naples server CPU. Rebranding a consumer 8C/16T Ryzen seems like a logical step, with the only cost being validation. The thing to remember is that supporting ECC on an AM4 motherboard basically amounts to running a few extra traces between the CPU and DRAM slots, and adding support in the BIOS to initialize the memory controller properly. My experiencing in implementing boot code to initialize memory controllers leads me to believe that it’s probably one or two days worth of work to actually get it working (once everything else is done). The real cost comes from testing and validation, which is why some manufacturers are so hesitant to give a straight answer regarding ECC support on consumer platforms. There is no point in spending the money to validate a feature that the majority of their customers think is a complete waste. By offering “working but not validated” ECC support, they’re able to satisfy the demand of those who want to use these chips for small non critical servers without undercutting their higher margin server grade components.
mee_too 10y ago
ECC is a feel good feature, but is mostly useless. Memory either is corrupted (which can be detected by running MemTest) or it works perfectly fine without ECC. I have over 50 10+ year old Itanium servers with 192GB ECC RAM each, there are 2 ECC errors logged total, while running 24/7.
- amaranth 10y ago
  Not that it's likely to matter for these systems but there has been some recent work on using ECC to recover from errors caused by refreshing less often. This would use less power so I suspect we'll see someone try it in phones or laptops soon. http://thememoryguy.com/using-ecc-to-reduce-power/ http://thememoryguy.com/using-ecc-to-reduce-power/
- sounds 10y ago
  Newer memory uses smaller transitors which are more easily corrupted.
  - mee_too 10y ago
    How much more - 1%, 10%, 100%? Has anyone ever seen an ECC error on a desktop, with a module that passes MemTest?
    - yuhong 10y ago
      Look up "rowhammer" attacks for example.
- resoluteteeth 10y ago
  > Memory either is corrupted (which can be detected by running MemTest) or it works perfectly fine without ECC. While there is reason to think soft errors are much less common than often claimed and therefore ECC memory has been much less necessary than people think (at least within the atmosphere), there's now a pretty good reason to prefer ECC memory because of rowhammer.
  - 10y ago

simplemath 10y ago

my homelab is ready.

chx 10y ago
Really not wanting to poop on anyone's parade but an off lease Dell/HP/Lenovo workstation used from eBay will beat the pants off anything else for homelab. You can get an E3-1240 V2 with 8Gb RAM for the kingly sum of ... $200. Including motherboard, chassis and PSU.
- aroch 10y ago
  And you're also stuck with a $200/month power bill and the full home heater.... Don't get me wrong, I have a bunch of rack pull servers and they're great for the price but I colo mine for less/server than the power bill/server would be at home and have them ona faster connection. I stick with low power options for light in-home usage
  - simplemath 10y ago
    ding ding ding
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    The single-socket Xeon E3 that GP mentioned is 69W TDP. The Ryzen 1700 is 65W, while the 1700x and 1800x are 95W. Why do you think the Ryzen box will be a lot less power hungry?
    - smallet 10y ago
      The Ryzen 1700 has 8/16 and much better performance compared to the mentioned Xeon E3. I think the Ryzen 5's would be the ones to look out for (still more cores and much less price), hope they push the power consumption even lower.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - DCKing 10y ago
      It doesn't matter what the TDP is. Home systems like HTPCs and home servers will run at their full power a very small amount of the time they're running. That means their maximum power usage (which is what TDP is supposed to indicate) does not matter. Modern processors do some clever tricks to minimize using power if it is not needed, and have gotten progressively better at it. For home use cases, it's often worthwile to spend more money to get newer or otherwise more efficient PC components. This is especially true in areas where electricity costs are higher (e.g. average price per KWh can be almost twice as high in the Benelux when compared to the US). One thing to get an indication about how good a CPU/chipset is is idle power usage of a system. It seems Ryzen is even better at this than Intel's already excellent Sky/Kaby Lake architectures [1], possibly because of the fact that Ryzen motherboards contain fewer components. On the contrary, the Ivy Bridge architecture of the chip mentioned by the parent cannot be considered competitive from a power consumption perspective, despite still being a great performer. [1]: https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-Review-Now-and-Zen/Power-Consumption-and-Conclusions https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- nagvx 10y ago
  Could you offer some specific, searchable product names?
  - chx 10y ago
    http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z220-SFF-Workstation-E3-1240-V2-QC-3-40Ghz-8Gb-1Tb-DVD-RW-Windows-7-Pro-I-/391718183147?hash=item5b343920eb:g:xMYAAOSw44BYi9N7 http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z220-SFF-Workstation-E3-1240-V2-Q...
- mrb 10y ago
  "beat the pants"? Compared to Ryzen, E3-1240 V2 has: half the cores, half the L3 cache, half the memory throughput of Ryzen, no AVX2, etc. Plus average price is more like $300-350 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerEdge-R210-II-1U-Rackmount-Server-E3-1240v2-CPU-250W-PSU-/191818994654?hash=item2ca94d93de:g:QaMAAOSwZG9WjaOJ http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerEdge-R210-II-1U-Rackmount-... And it's still comparing apples to oranges favoring Intel. Wait a few months and compare used Ryzen gear to that old Intel gear...
  - chx 10y ago
    Check price per performance please. And I said workstation, not sure why everyone is looking at rack servers? http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z220-SFF-Workstation-E3-1240-V2-QC-3-40Ghz-8Gb-1Tb-DVD-RW-Windows-7-Pro-I-/391718183147?hash=item5b343920eb:g:xMYAAOSw44BYi9N7 http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z220-SFF-Workstation-E3-1240-V2-Q...
  - psandersen 10y ago
    Depends on your needs, dual socket xeon servers can be had with huge amounts of ram if you shop around. E.g. I got an IBM 3650 m2 with 2x L5640 and 128gb of ecc ram for $200. For my needs (heavy data processing on a budget) its been awesome.
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  You can get used amd workstations too its not really valid to compare the cost of used 5 year old machines vs new.

Unklejoe 10y ago

Link to the comment of the CEO of AMD confirming that Ryzen supports ECC memory: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_creators_of_athlon_radeon_and_other/def58sv/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...

BayesStreet 10y ago
For anyone looking at a new AM4 build with high speed memory, be warned that Linus' review stated he could not POST with memory clocked past 2666MHz[0] [0]https://youtu.be/9wJQEHNYE7M?t=4m43s https://youtu.be/9wJQEHNYE7M?t=4m43s
- jrockway 10y ago
  Is this uncommon? I have a 6950X with some "3200MHz" RAM, and it definitely doesn't work reliably at that speed. Nothing above 2666MHz will pass stress tests, even with conservative timings. Ultimately the memory clock speed doesn't affect performance very much, so I'm not sure it matters.
- AlphaSite 10y ago
  It's very motherboard dependant (and on prerelease BIOSes. Although if the issue lies with AMD or The motherboard maker we shall see later.
jbmorgado 10y ago
Isn't the problem with AMD mobos that it's very difficult to find a motherboard manufacturer that supports the ECC? From what I've been reading about the upcoming Ryzen, no motherboard so far claims to support ECC.
- Unklejoe 10y ago
  It has sort of been that way in the past, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were similar issues with Ryzen at first. However, I expect that there will eventually be some workstation grade motherboards from vendors like Supermicro which will be more direct about guaranteeing ECC support. This will be especially true if AMD decides to release some “official” small server grade CPUs on the AM4 socket (kind of like Intel’s Xeon E3 which uses the regular consumer socket, but requires a different chipset). I don’t know if there are any plans for such a CPU from AMD, but it wouldn’t surprise me considering there’s probably some real demand for something a little less expensive and powerful than the 32C/64T Naples server CPU. Rebranding a consumer 8C/16T Ryzen seems like a logical step, with the only cost being validation. The thing to remember is that supporting ECC on an AM4 motherboard basically amounts to running a few extra traces between the CPU and DRAM slots, and adding support in the BIOS to initialize the memory controller properly. My experiencing in implementing boot code to initialize memory controllers leads me to believe that it’s probably one or two days worth of work to actually get it working (once everything else is done). The real cost comes from testing and validation, which is why some manufacturers are so hesitant to give a straight answer regarding ECC support on consumer platforms. There is no point in spending the money to validate a feature that the majority of their customers think is a complete waste. By offering “working but not validated” ECC support, they’re able to satisfy the demand of those who want to use these chips for small non critical servers without undercutting their higher margin server grade components.

mee_too 10y ago

ECC is a feel good feature, but is mostly useless. Memory either is corrupted (which can be detected by running MemTest) or it works perfectly fine without ECC. I have over 50 10+ year old Itanium servers with 192GB ECC RAM each, there are 2 ECC errors logged total, while running 24/7.

amaranth 10y ago
Not that it's likely to matter for these systems but there has been some recent work on using ECC to recover from errors caused by refreshing less often. This would use less power so I suspect we'll see someone try it in phones or laptops soon. http://thememoryguy.com/using-ecc-to-reduce-power/ http://thememoryguy.com/using-ecc-to-reduce-power/
sounds 10y ago
Newer memory uses smaller transitors which are more easily corrupted.
- mee_too 10y ago
  How much more - 1%, 10%, 100%? Has anyone ever seen an ECC error on a desktop, with a module that passes MemTest?
  - yuhong 10y ago
    Look up "rowhammer" attacks for example.
resoluteteeth 10y ago
> Memory either is corrupted (which can be detected by running MemTest) or it works perfectly fine without ECC. While there is reason to think soft errors are much less common than often claimed and therefore ECC memory has been much less necessary than people think (at least within the atmosphere), there's now a pretty good reason to prefer ECC memory because of rowhammer.
- 10y ago