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This illustrates one of the truism's in semi-conductors which is that you need to hold an advantage for 18 months before you have enough momentum to actually mo

This illustrates one of the truism's in semi-conductors which is that you need to hold an advantage for 18 months before you have enough momentum to actually move the needle. If I were AMD's marketing team I would start hammering on ECC memory in the desktop and on laptops. Anything with 16GB or more of main memory. Intel has held that as a Xeon differentiator for a long time and it adds something like 20% margin to the part. That AMD can push PCIe 4.0 and ECC at 'desktop' prices is pretty neat.

lorenzhs 7y ago
Outside of our bubble, people don't care about ECC memory on their laptop or desktop. It also adds ~12% (iirc) more memory cells, meaning higher memory cost, which is going to be a hard sell given that it's a solution to a problem that most customers don't even know about, nor would most care much if it was explained to them. From a user perspective, memory is fine as it is, and if memory corruption does occur, it's probably blamed on buggy software. That would make any such push look like a desperate "we need a differentiator to tell people why they should buy our CPUs and upsell them in the process" move. Competing on price, speed, and (for laptops) power consumption would appear much more promising.
- vardump 7y ago
  It needs to be marketed as a reliability improvement it is. Lots of people simply don't know about it at all, but would love better stability.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    This is mass market retail we’re talking about. Unless it’s easily demonstrable, people are going to buy the prettier box on the shelf or the one that’s cheaper. I’d bet money that when company X adds ECC and calls it “super stable memory”, company Y adds a button in the settings menu that calls fsck and calls that “hyper stable memory” and undercuts company X by 12%.
- baybal2 7y ago
  Actually, you can have ECC without an extra chip, and 4 gen DDRs actually have quote low single bit error rates because they have error correcting PHYs
- viraptor 7y ago
  People don't care about a lot of things until they're told it matters. I mean, look at the "gaming" and "X with RGB" market and tell me people name economically reasonable choices when buying computer hardware. I'm sure marketing could sell quite a few ECC sticks.
me_me_me 7y ago
> ECC memory in the desktop and on laptops Wow and here I though RGB lighting was pinnacle of pointlessness.
- tatersolid 7y ago
  Non-ECC RAM bit flips are pretty common at modern densities. They can cause everything from a stray pixel on screen, to crashes, to corrupted files and file systems. At $dayjob we only have like 200 laptops but our help desk staff find 1-3 bad non-ECC DIMMs a year causing crashes or borked files.
  - me_me_me 7y ago
    Well, you said it... 3 crashes a year vs cost of 200 ECC RAM. (say refresh of pc every 3 years). So in lifetime of those machines you will experience 9 crashes. Is it really cost effective? Also file versioning, automatic backups of files should be a standard in any serious business. So in reality no work would be lost to crash, only bit of time.
    - zaarn 7y ago
      The problem is that backups don't work if the file is already corrupted when it's being written, most filesystems aren't very robust to on-disk corruption (and even those that are like ZFS have quite a few fun bugs if there is memory corruption present). Even versioning will not save you if you version already corrupted data.
      - me_me_me 7y ago
        I am programing over 10 years, that never happened to me and I never heard of anyone who had experienced something like that. Your words/excels save a copy of files upon opening (to handle crashes or corruption). Is it worth entertaining this scenario? Unless you are running on a space probe or nuclear facility pc that's non-issue worth any time.
bgorman 7y ago
Iirc, all AMD CPUs support ECC- but motherboard support is flaky.
- ChuckMcM 7y ago
  That is correct, it requires that the BIOS set up the appropriate machine check vectors and initialize RAM during POST. My current desktop with 32GB gets 2 - 3 single bit errors a month. (it has a Xeon, will be replacing it with a Ryzen 3000 series relatively soon with 128GB of RAM)
  - bitL 7y ago
    ECC UDIMM RAM is way too expensive comparing to LRDIMM and you can barely get 32GB ECC UDIMM modules. Not going to happen...
    - ChuckMcM 7y ago
      You under estimate my willingness to overspend on things :-).
      - ChuckMcM 7y ago
        And there it is; ASUS Prime TRX40 Pro, 128GB ECC memory, and a 3950x CPU.
      - sliken 7y ago
        Sounds like Epyc to me. 7302P (16c/32T), 7402P (24c/48t), 7502p (32c/64t), or 7702P (64c/128T). You also get 4 times the memory bandwidth and motherboards guaranteed to work with ECC. Of you could go half way, threadripper comes out tomorrow or so and has twice the memory bandwidth of Ryzen/half of Epyc in the TRX40 parts. There's also a TRX80 which is using the same socket/memory bandwidth as Epyc.
        ChuckMcM 7y ago
        Yeah, I was trying to figure out how to cool a Supermicro dual socket board in my desktop case. Its a challenge, they really want the big datacenter type rack fans blowing through the system and that is a bit too noisy for me. On the plus side it could have way more RAM. :-)
lettergram 7y ago
EOY and beginning of year is when most purchases for servers come in too. I suspect we will see AMD will spike in the next six months. I know I’m also waiting to buy a laptop until the 7nm mobile chips are out. That’ll be a massive battery life increase (A couple hours), to the point that people will flock to AMD.
- ladberg 7y ago
  Chances are, whatever laptop gets made with that new chip will just have a thinner battery and the same battery life unfortunately :(
NicoJuicy 7y ago
I think AMD's marketing team is more based on partnerships ( and custom solutions), than on big ads. They should push more for partnerships with OEM's though.
reacharavindh 7y ago
I agree with your view. Just want to add that from recent intel and AMD server purchases, the price difference in processors though considerable, is shadowed by the cost of memory sticks... for a fully loaded server, the cost savings from going to AMD appears like a small number next to the cost of mem sticks. PCIe 4.0, more mem channels, and faster memory (3200) does make things very attractive.

lorenzhs 7y ago

Outside of our bubble, people don't care about ECC memory on their laptop or desktop. It also adds ~12% (iirc) more memory cells, meaning higher memory cost, which is going to be a hard sell given that it's a solution to a problem that most customers don't even know about, nor would most care much if it was explained to them. From a user perspective, memory is fine as it is, and if memory corruption does occur, it's probably blamed on buggy software. That would make any such push look like a desperate "we need a differentiator to tell people why they should buy our CPUs and upsell them in the process" move. Competing on price, speed, and (for laptops) power consumption would appear much more promising.

vardump 7y ago
It needs to be marketed as a reliability improvement it is. Lots of people simply don't know about it at all, but would love better stability.
- kube-system 7y ago
  This is mass market retail we’re talking about. Unless it’s easily demonstrable, people are going to buy the prettier box on the shelf or the one that’s cheaper. I’d bet money that when company X adds ECC and calls it “super stable memory”, company Y adds a button in the settings menu that calls fsck and calls that “hyper stable memory” and undercuts company X by 12%.
baybal2 7y ago
Actually, you can have ECC without an extra chip, and 4 gen DDRs actually have quote low single bit error rates because they have error correcting PHYs
viraptor 7y ago
People don't care about a lot of things until they're told it matters. I mean, look at the "gaming" and "X with RGB" market and tell me people name economically reasonable choices when buying computer hardware. I'm sure marketing could sell quite a few ECC sticks.

me_me_me 7y ago

> ECC memory in the desktop and on laptops Wow and here I though RGB lighting was pinnacle of pointlessness.

tatersolid 7y ago
Non-ECC RAM bit flips are pretty common at modern densities. They can cause everything from a stray pixel on screen, to crashes, to corrupted files and file systems. At $dayjob we only have like 200 laptops but our help desk staff find 1-3 bad non-ECC DIMMs a year causing crashes or borked files.
- me_me_me 7y ago
  Well, you said it... 3 crashes a year vs cost of 200 ECC RAM. (say refresh of pc every 3 years). So in lifetime of those machines you will experience 9 crashes. Is it really cost effective? Also file versioning, automatic backups of files should be a standard in any serious business. So in reality no work would be lost to crash, only bit of time.
  - zaarn 7y ago
    The problem is that backups don't work if the file is already corrupted when it's being written, most filesystems aren't very robust to on-disk corruption (and even those that are like ZFS have quite a few fun bugs if there is memory corruption present). Even versioning will not save you if you version already corrupted data.
    - me_me_me 7y ago
      I am programing over 10 years, that never happened to me and I never heard of anyone who had experienced something like that. Your words/excels save a copy of files upon opening (to handle crashes or corruption). Is it worth entertaining this scenario? Unless you are running on a space probe or nuclear facility pc that's non-issue worth any time.

bgorman 7y ago

Iirc, all AMD CPUs support ECC- but motherboard support is flaky.

ChuckMcM 7y ago
That is correct, it requires that the BIOS set up the appropriate machine check vectors and initialize RAM during POST. My current desktop with 32GB gets 2 - 3 single bit errors a month. (it has a Xeon, will be replacing it with a Ryzen 3000 series relatively soon with 128GB of RAM)
- bitL 7y ago
  ECC UDIMM RAM is way too expensive comparing to LRDIMM and you can barely get 32GB ECC UDIMM modules. Not going to happen...
  - ChuckMcM 7y ago
    You under estimate my willingness to overspend on things :-).
    - ChuckMcM 7y ago
      And there it is; ASUS Prime TRX40 Pro, 128GB ECC memory, and a 3950x CPU.
    - sliken 7y ago
      Sounds like Epyc to me. 7302P (16c/32T), 7402P (24c/48t), 7502p (32c/64t), or 7702P (64c/128T). You also get 4 times the memory bandwidth and motherboards guaranteed to work with ECC. Of you could go half way, threadripper comes out tomorrow or so and has twice the memory bandwidth of Ryzen/half of Epyc in the TRX40 parts. There's also a TRX80 which is using the same socket/memory bandwidth as Epyc.
      - ChuckMcM 7y ago
        Yeah, I was trying to figure out how to cool a Supermicro dual socket board in my desktop case. Its a challenge, they really want the big datacenter type rack fans blowing through the system and that is a bit too noisy for me. On the plus side it could have way more RAM. :-)

lettergram 7y ago

EOY and beginning of year is when most purchases for servers come in too. I suspect we will see AMD will spike in the next six months. I know I’m also waiting to buy a laptop until the 7nm mobile chips are out. That’ll be a massive battery life increase (A couple hours), to the point that people will flock to AMD.

ladberg 7y ago
Chances are, whatever laptop gets made with that new chip will just have a thinner battery and the same battery life unfortunately :(

NicoJuicy 7y ago

I think AMD's marketing team is more based on partnerships ( and custom solutions), than on big ads. They should push more for partnerships with OEM's though.

reacharavindh 7y ago

I agree with your view. Just want to add that from recent intel and AMD server purchases, the price difference in processors though considerable, is shadowed by the cost of memory sticks... for a fully loaded server, the cost savings from going to AMD appears like a small number next to the cost of mem sticks. PCIe 4.0, more mem channels, and faster memory (3200) does make things very attractive.