6 ms·

So does it support ECC like AMD? Otherwise not interested.

masklinn 9y ago
I can see no mention of it anywhere and it's a "consumer" chip (for Intel, ECC is a segmentation feature between consumer and server hardware), so probably not.
simias 9y ago
I'll bite: every time I see a CPU-related thread on HN there are a few people clamoring for ECC support. While I get why I'd want ECC on a high-availability server running critical tasks, I don't really feel a massive need for it on a workstation. I mean of course if it's given to me "for free" I'll gladly take it, but otherwise I'll prefer to trade it for more RAM or simply a cheaper build. Why is ECC that much of a big deal for you? Maybe I'm lucky but I manage quite a few computers (at work and at home) and I haven't had a faulty RAM module in at least a year. And even if I do I run memtest to isolate the issue and then order a new module. An inconvenience of course, but pretty minor one IMO. Do you also use redundant power supplies? I think in the past years I've had more issues with broken power supplies than RAM modules.
- muro 9y ago
  https://danluu.com/why-ecc/ https://danluu.com/why-ecc/
- mozumder 9y ago
  Use ECC for workstations to avoid crashes and to extend the lifespan of the system. You start to get more crashes as the years go by. Silicon degrades over time under use.
- matt4077 9y ago
  Personally, I mostly value ECC for the sense of superiority it affords.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > I think in the past years I've had more issues with broken power supplies than RAM modules. That you know about. See, that's where ECC comes in.
  - simias 9y ago
    If a bit flips in a lone workstation and noone is around to see it, does it make a bug? More seriously though, in my experience faulty RAM is generally pretty easy to diagnose and leads to general system instability. I guess the worst case scenario is generating corrupt data before the issue is diagnosed but again while I would be very wary of that on an database server or something similar, I've never found it to be a massive issue on a workstation (at least if you have decent backups that is). But maybe I've just been lucky so far. But given that the vast majority of consumer-grade computers don't come with ECC and yet RAM issues are still relatively rare I guess I'm not the only lucky one.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      > If a bit flips in a lone workstation and noone is around to see it, does it make a bug? No, bugs are - these days - considered to be mostly software issues, undetected hardware faults are not bugs in that sense but could lead to data corruption or at a much higher level wrong output. If you don't care at all about the output of your computer (game playing, other recreational use) then not having ECC is fine, but if you do care about your results and you have multiple 10's or even 100's of GB of RAM in your machine then to have the option of ECC is useful. Intel is just using the ECC thing as a way to justify the price difference between their Xeon product line and the consumer stuff. If you ever have to deal with a filesystem that slowly got corrupted because of an undetected memory issue you'll be overnight transformed into an ECC advocate. Keep in mind that those 'decent backups' were made by the machine you do not trust. And god help you if your backups were incremental.
      - simias 9y ago
        An other approach is to verify your output (preferably on an other system). Good validation and test suites should be able to catch messed up "output" along with many other non-ECC related issues. I guess it makes sense to have ECC RAM on the machine building your releases (I actually don't even have that at the moment but I wouldn't advocate that...) but for your dev machine does it really matter? I mean, at this point it's really about a rather subjective perception of risk and particular use cases. In my situation I find that memory issues are very low on my list of "things that can go catastrophically wrong". Really the only thing I can think about is building a corrupt release on my non-ECC build server. But from experience I'm not exactly in the minority to do that either and yet I don't observe many such issues in the wild.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
  > I haven't had a faulty RAM module in at least a year ECC isn't for physically broken RAM, it's for the prevention of data corruption caused by environmental bit-errors (e.g. cosmic-ray bitflips). Memory density increases with RAM capacity - which means a higher potential for noise (and cosmic-rays...) to make one-off changes here-and-there. I understand this now happens quite regularly, even on today's desktops ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what-is-the-probability-they-will-affect-a-program https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what... ) - I guess we just don't observe it much because probably most RAM is occupied by non-executable data or otherwise-free memory - and if it's a desktop or laptop then you're probably rebooting it regularly so any corruption in system memory would be corrected too.
  - simias 9y ago
    This stack overflow link is interesting but most of the concern is over very theoretical issues. In practice a significant portion of the humanity uses multiple non-ECC RAM devices every day and yet most of us don't seem to experience widespread memory issues. I can't even remember the last time my desktop experienced a hard crash (well actually I can, it was because of a faulty... graphic card). I wish my phone fared that well, but I'm not sure RAM would be the first suspect for my general Android stability issues...
    - muro 9y ago
      It's not just about crashes, but also about (silent) data corruption.
    - sho 9y ago
      > most of the concern is over very theoretical issues I've seen photo and other binary files become corrupted that were sitting on RAID drives. The RAID swears they're fine, the filesystem swears they're fine, both are checksummed so I believe them. The only possibility that I can see is that they were corrupted while being modified or transferred on non-ECC desktops connected to the RAID. I'm not afraid of my computer crashing. I'm afraid of data I take great pains to preserve being silently, indeed undetectably, corrupted while in flight or in use. So that's why ECC is worth it to me.
- auganov 9y ago
  I'm sure all of you who love debating ECC will enjoy this defcon video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT7mnSstKGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT7mnSstKGs "DEFCON 19: Bit-squatting: DNS Hijacking Without Exploitation (w speaker)"
- ghshephard 9y ago
  The value of ECC for me isn't to provide redundancy, or error correcting, it's to let me know that the RAM (or parity bit) is going bad. Otherwise you are flying blind and injecting bit rot without being aware of it. You write, " I haven't had a faulty RAM module in at least a year." - How do you know this without ECC?
- ioquatix 9y ago
  It's entirely possible that a broken power supply might cause the ram to silently corrupt data, in which case, ECC would help.
- StillBored 9y ago
  The problem is, without ECC you won't know if you have marginal RAM. Basic memory tests can frequently pass for hours at a time, only to have a couple bits flip a few days later. Plus, with tens of GB of RAM, you likely won't even notice, as the majority of that RAM is being used as disk cache, or application data. The best case (but likely the lowest probability) is that the bit flip happens in an executable page on an instruction that gets executed (vs the large number which won't get executed) and the application crashes. If that happens you will never figure out why your application crashes, but if it happens enough, you will start looking for problems.
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    > If that happens you will never figure out why your application crashes, but if it happens enough, you will start looking for problems. Ironically, I had this happen. In particular Overwatch would crash constantly on my gaming rig starting around June, I reinstalled Windows, reverted to Windows 7, tried various video driver revisions and NOTHING MADE SENSE. Eventually started pulling parts out of my system, lo and behold a single 4GB stick of RAM was bad and causing all my grief. If I had ECC memory I would have known what the problem was right away, and replaced it without pulling my hair out first.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      If you had had ECC you might not have noticed anything at all because your system worked just fine other than incrementing an error counter somewhere in the kernel. This depends to some extent on how many parts of that stick were affected. But best case the system would have simply recovered.
- bzbarsky 9y ago
  > Why is ECC that much of a big deal for you? Here's one example: looking at Firefox crash data, a fairly large percentage of crashes are caused by bitflips that corrupt data structures (e.g. making a null pointer which is null-checked into a non-null one that points off into memory that can't be read). So what I really want is for everyone to default to ECC RAM. It would prevent issues like that to a large degree.
- anarazel 9y ago
  > Why is ECC that much of a big deal for you? Not the op, but I twice spent weeks debugging random software crashes under high load that turned out to be triggered by faulty memory. Because it was while working on a locking infrastructure I really had to figure out why it was crashing on my workstation and couldn't just be content that I couldn't reproduce or elsewhere.
dom0 9y ago
This is Intel. None of the previous iX HEDT platforms supported ECC. Intel being Intel also means that they remove features for cheap (i.e. <1000 $) parts, such as memory channels or PCIe lanes.
- nerpderp83 9y ago
  I would really hope that AMD enabling ECC on all parts would cause Intel to stop differentiating their product lines on something that should be available everywhere. ECC should be mandated except for the least critical uses (toys, video players, etc).

I can see no mention of it anywhere and it's a "consumer" chip (for Intel, ECC is a segmentation feature between consumer and server hardware), so probably not.

simias 9y ago

I'll bite: every time I see a CPU-related thread on HN there are a few people clamoring for ECC support. While I get why I'd want ECC on a high-availability server running critical tasks, I don't really feel a massive need for it on a workstation. I mean of course if it's given to me "for free" I'll gladly take it, but otherwise I'll prefer to trade it for more RAM or simply a cheaper build. Why is ECC that much of a big deal for you? Maybe I'm lucky but I manage quite a few computers (at work and at home) and I haven't had a faulty RAM module in at least a year. And even if I do I run memtest to isolate the issue and then order a new module. An inconvenience of course, but pretty minor one IMO. Do you also use redundant power supplies? I think in the past years I've had more issues with broken power supplies than RAM modules.

muro 9y ago
https://danluu.com/why-ecc/ https://danluu.com/why-ecc/
mozumder 9y ago
Use ECC for workstations to avoid crashes and to extend the lifespan of the system. You start to get more crashes as the years go by. Silicon degrades over time under use.
matt4077 9y ago
Personally, I mostly value ECC for the sense of superiority it affords.
jacquesm 9y ago
> I think in the past years I've had more issues with broken power supplies than RAM modules. That you know about. See, that's where ECC comes in.
- simias 9y ago
  If a bit flips in a lone workstation and noone is around to see it, does it make a bug? More seriously though, in my experience faulty RAM is generally pretty easy to diagnose and leads to general system instability. I guess the worst case scenario is generating corrupt data before the issue is diagnosed but again while I would be very wary of that on an database server or something similar, I've never found it to be a massive issue on a workstation (at least if you have decent backups that is). But maybe I've just been lucky so far. But given that the vast majority of consumer-grade computers don't come with ECC and yet RAM issues are still relatively rare I guess I'm not the only lucky one.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > If a bit flips in a lone workstation and noone is around to see it, does it make a bug? No, bugs are - these days - considered to be mostly software issues, undetected hardware faults are not bugs in that sense but could lead to data corruption or at a much higher level wrong output. If you don't care at all about the output of your computer (game playing, other recreational use) then not having ECC is fine, but if you do care about your results and you have multiple 10's or even 100's of GB of RAM in your machine then to have the option of ECC is useful. Intel is just using the ECC thing as a way to justify the price difference between their Xeon product line and the consumer stuff. If you ever have to deal with a filesystem that slowly got corrupted because of an undetected memory issue you'll be overnight transformed into an ECC advocate. Keep in mind that those 'decent backups' were made by the machine you do not trust. And god help you if your backups were incremental.
    - simias 9y ago
      An other approach is to verify your output (preferably on an other system). Good validation and test suites should be able to catch messed up "output" along with many other non-ECC related issues. I guess it makes sense to have ECC RAM on the machine building your releases (I actually don't even have that at the moment but I wouldn't advocate that...) but for your dev machine does it really matter? I mean, at this point it's really about a rather subjective perception of risk and particular use cases. In my situation I find that memory issues are very low on my list of "things that can go catastrophically wrong". Really the only thing I can think about is building a corrupt release on my non-ECC build server. But from experience I'm not exactly in the minority to do that either and yet I don't observe many such issues in the wild.
DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
> I haven't had a faulty RAM module in at least a year ECC isn't for physically broken RAM, it's for the prevention of data corruption caused by environmental bit-errors (e.g. cosmic-ray bitflips). Memory density increases with RAM capacity - which means a higher potential for noise (and cosmic-rays...) to make one-off changes here-and-there. I understand this now happens quite regularly, even on today's desktops ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what-is-the-probability-they-will-affect-a-program https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2580933/cosmic-rays-what... ) - I guess we just don't observe it much because probably most RAM is occupied by non-executable data or otherwise-free memory - and if it's a desktop or laptop then you're probably rebooting it regularly so any corruption in system memory would be corrected too.
- simias 9y ago
  This stack overflow link is interesting but most of the concern is over very theoretical issues. In practice a significant portion of the humanity uses multiple non-ECC RAM devices every day and yet most of us don't seem to experience widespread memory issues. I can't even remember the last time my desktop experienced a hard crash (well actually I can, it was because of a faulty... graphic card). I wish my phone fared that well, but I'm not sure RAM would be the first suspect for my general Android stability issues...
  - muro 9y ago
    It's not just about crashes, but also about (silent) data corruption.
  - sho 9y ago
    > most of the concern is over very theoretical issues I've seen photo and other binary files become corrupted that were sitting on RAID drives. The RAID swears they're fine, the filesystem swears they're fine, both are checksummed so I believe them. The only possibility that I can see is that they were corrupted while being modified or transferred on non-ECC desktops connected to the RAID. I'm not afraid of my computer crashing. I'm afraid of data I take great pains to preserve being silently, indeed undetectably, corrupted while in flight or in use. So that's why ECC is worth it to me.
auganov 9y ago
I'm sure all of you who love debating ECC will enjoy this defcon video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT7mnSstKGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT7mnSstKGs "DEFCON 19: Bit-squatting: DNS Hijacking Without Exploitation (w speaker)"
ghshephard 9y ago
The value of ECC for me isn't to provide redundancy, or error correcting, it's to let me know that the RAM (or parity bit) is going bad. Otherwise you are flying blind and injecting bit rot without being aware of it. You write, " I haven't had a faulty RAM module in at least a year." - How do you know this without ECC?
ioquatix 9y ago
It's entirely possible that a broken power supply might cause the ram to silently corrupt data, in which case, ECC would help.
StillBored 9y ago
The problem is, without ECC you won't know if you have marginal RAM. Basic memory tests can frequently pass for hours at a time, only to have a couple bits flip a few days later. Plus, with tens of GB of RAM, you likely won't even notice, as the majority of that RAM is being used as disk cache, or application data. The best case (but likely the lowest probability) is that the bit flip happens in an executable page on an instruction that gets executed (vs the large number which won't get executed) and the application crashes. If that happens you will never figure out why your application crashes, but if it happens enough, you will start looking for problems.
- snuxoll 9y ago
  > If that happens you will never figure out why your application crashes, but if it happens enough, you will start looking for problems. Ironically, I had this happen. In particular Overwatch would crash constantly on my gaming rig starting around June, I reinstalled Windows, reverted to Windows 7, tried various video driver revisions and NOTHING MADE SENSE. Eventually started pulling parts out of my system, lo and behold a single 4GB stick of RAM was bad and causing all my grief. If I had ECC memory I would have known what the problem was right away, and replaced it without pulling my hair out first.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    If you had had ECC you might not have noticed anything at all because your system worked just fine other than incrementing an error counter somewhere in the kernel. This depends to some extent on how many parts of that stick were affected. But best case the system would have simply recovered.
bzbarsky 9y ago
> Why is ECC that much of a big deal for you? Here's one example: looking at Firefox crash data, a fairly large percentage of crashes are caused by bitflips that corrupt data structures (e.g. making a null pointer which is null-checked into a non-null one that points off into memory that can't be read). So what I really want is for everyone to default to ECC RAM. It would prevent issues like that to a large degree.
anarazel 9y ago
> Why is ECC that much of a big deal for you? Not the op, but I twice spent weeks debugging random software crashes under high load that turned out to be triggered by faulty memory. Because it was while working on a locking infrastructure I really had to figure out why it was crashing on my workstation and couldn't just be content that I couldn't reproduce or elsewhere.

dom0 9y ago

This is Intel. None of the previous iX HEDT platforms supported ECC. Intel being Intel also means that they remove features for cheap (i.e. <1000 $) parts, such as memory channels or PCIe lanes.

nerpderp83 9y ago
I would really hope that AMD enabling ECC on all parts would cause Intel to stop differentiating their product lines on something that should be available everywhere. ECC should be mandated except for the least critical uses (toys, video players, etc).