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At this point, picking AMD for your CPU becomes such a no-brainer. Compounded by Intel’s security issues and all.
by koluna 6y ago
At this point, picking AMD for your CPU becomes such a no-brainer. Compounded by Intel’s security issues and all.
- listic 6y agoUnless you want an integrated video card in your high-end CPU.
- vbezhenar 6y agoECC support in AMD systems is strange. It's supported theoretically, but practically there are issues, one have to carefully pick motherboard and even then it's some kind of unsupported configuration. Intel sells cheap and fast Xeons with proper ECC support. I'm very interested in AMD CPUs and I hope that ECC story will improve, so I can buy some kind of workstation-branded motherboard and use fully supported ECC configuration.
- dragontamer 6y agoECC support is iffy at the consumer brands. Its a "we won't disable it, but we won't guarantee that it works" sort of deal. If you want verified ECC support, you need to buy the workstation chips and motherboards: Threadripper Pro or EPYCs.
- JackMcMack 6y agoECC is supported on the Pro series as well. My home server is running Ryzen 5 Pro 4650G (yay for integrated graphics) and Asrock B550M. I went through the effort of using qvl memory, but actually testing ECC is a bit more difficult. While ECC is supported & active, memory errors are sadly not reported to the OS. I remember seeing a forum post somewhere of somebody overclocking/undervolting the ram to force errors, but I can't seem to find it right now. There's a fine line between stable, stable with recovered errors, and unstable.
- vbezhenar 6y agoThat's what I'm talking about and I wouldn't call it "fully supported". I want to know about ECC statistics. It's important because if I can see that ECC recovers abnormally high number of errors, it's likely that I need to replace RAM right now.
- JackMcMack 6y agoI don't disagree with you, but when was the last time you ever had to replace a stick of ram?
- account42 6y agoThis year for me.
- adrian_b 6y agoECC statistics are available for Ryzen if you use Linux (configured to load the appropriate EDAC module). So on Linux, ECC is fully supported, even with Ryzen.
- effie 6y agoDo you know for which motherboards this is true? I think ASRock Rack X470D4U should be fine, as they market it as server board. https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-x470d4u-review-amd-ryzen-meet-server/ https://www.servethehome.com/asrock-rack-x470d4u-review-amd-...
- adrian_b 6y agoI have used an older ASRock MB with the first generation Zen, and it was OK with ECC. With Ryzen 3xxx, I have used ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE ($315), which is sold as a workstation board, so you definitely should expect ECC to work without problems, and also the Mini-ITX MB ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 ($230), which also worked OK. I expect that the other ASRock MB's (most of them or maybe all of them specify the support of ECC) also work OK with ECC modules. The ASrock Rack server board should also not have any problems with ECC. IIRC that server board supports only up to DDR4-2933, but until now faster unbuffered ECC memory modules were not sold anywhere, so that is not a disadvantage. Edit: I have looked again at the ASRock site and they have updated the memory support specification. If you use only 2 UDIMM modules (i.e. up to 64 GB total), then you can use up to DDR4-3200 (which I have never seen offered anywhere until now; 2666 is easy to find, 2933 is also supported by Intel since March, so it should become available soon).
- TwoNineA 6y agoThe latest BIOS for ASUS Prime X370 Pro has ECC explicitly as a configuration option. Seems to work in Linux. I am using 2x8R ECC 2666Mhz RAM from Kingston.
- effie 6y agoInteresting! Do you think this BIOS or ECC works also on X370 Crosshair VI Hero? Hard to find info on this...
- NorwegianDude 6y agoIt's up to the motherboard vendor. They'll guarantee that it works if you use memory from the memory QVL. Example: https://www.asus.com/no/Motherboards/Pro-WS-X570-ACE/HelpDesk_QVL/ https://www.asus.com/no/Motherboards/Pro-WS-X570-ACE/HelpDes...
- p_l 6y agoThe difference is that AMD doesn't disable ECC support in any model line, while Intel disables it, sometimes without rhyme. Extra funny when you notice that certain Xeon lines are actually i7 with different branding and ECC left enabled. The problems with ECC on AMD comes from consumer vendors not putting the time into testing, and possibly not even connecting the ECC lines (remember, ECC requires putting additional traces between memory controller and memory slots). Then you have to deal with whatever customisation the vendor of the motherboard did to firmware - their changes might have resulted in effective disabling of ECC. With Intel, you either have the same game as above (with the non-Xeon ECC-capable parts), or pay through the nose for comparable performance "workstation/enterprise" gear, as ECC support being used for market segmentation by intel is pretty much an open secret.
- charwalker 6y agoYeah, with Haswell you could get an i7-4770 for like $320 or a Xeon E3-1245v3 (includes an iGPU) that ran the same clock speed and spec, generally, but was about $270. If you went for the 1241v3 you lost the iGPU and 4 watts of power usage but gain +100mhz base clock. And that gen of CPUS had low power T-series chips rated at 65w where today it's 35w. The power drop is part of why I'm happy with my SFF setup as the thermals are quite good on 14nm locked CPUs like my 7700.
- vbezhenar 6y agoYou don't need to pay through the nose with Intel, at least for latest generation. 10900K costs $499. 10900K with ECC called Xeon W-1290P and costs $539. That's 8% extra. ASUS Pro WS W480-Ace is $280 which is reasonable cost for a good motherboard.
- spockz 6y agoHow do you discover which Xeon is the i7 version of the same chip or vice versa? Is it just spelunking through Intel Ark to find a same generation, clock speeds Xeon or is there more to it?
- 6y ago
- baybal2 6y agoA very good way to undercut low end Xeons which were bought solely for their insurance against an out of the blue crash.
- DCKing 6y agoAMD guarantees ECC works with their workstation focused Threadripper line. On Ryzen, it only works if you do your homework picking hardware. It's a shame they made the TR platform much more expensive in the last generation.
- henriquez 6y agoIs that a new thing? I have an older Threadripper and my motherboard definitely doesn’t support ECC (even though the CPU does)
- DCKing 6y agoAs far as I know all Threadripper chips and board were required to support ECC. Mind you this means UDIMM ECC commonly targeted at workstations, not the RDIMM ECC used in servers.
- adrian_b 6y agoYou are right, but if you buy a motherboard that claims to support ECC, you will usually not have any problems. For example I am using an ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE, which is a reasonably priced workstation board ($300) with a Ryzen 7 3700X and ECC memory. ECC worked OK, without any problems. I have also used a couple of ASRock MB's and ECC also worked OK on them. I would much prefer more guarantees from AMD, but rather than buying a slow Intel CPU I prefer a little risk with AMD.
- loeg 6y agoWhat Xeon and Xeon motherboard with ECC support are "cheap?" In that price range, AMD markets Threadripper and Epyc, both with proper ECC support. ECC support in Ryzen systems is up to the motherboard manufacturer, and some manufacturers advertise support very clearly. E.g., at least a couple years ago, ASRock explicitly supported ECC in all their Ryzen motherboards.
- effie 6y agoNew workstation Xeons (Comet Lake), e.g. Xeon W-1250, W-1270, W-1290 are hard to find online but can be seen, in few places, for 350,500,800 euro. Motherboards for these Xeons (socket LGA1200) seem to be a somewhat pricier at 300 euro, but they positively have ECC. Intel still costs more for same perf/capabilities, but if you need ECC and Intel platform, it isn't crazy. Most people wanting ECC just for the warm fuzzy enthusiast feeling would prefer Ryzen with good MB that supports ECC. Intel makes more sense at the high-end many-core Xeons, due to supporting huge memory with much higher throughput (LGA3647). But that segment is bonkers-expensive.
- floatboth 6y agoThat's an interesting kind of enthusiasm. The usual PC enthusiast thing is to overclock memory to hell until the system starts glitching and dial it back just a little and call it a day :)
- vbezhenar 6y agoI don't feel myself confident with flaky hardware. I'm using UPS and ECC, so I can be sure that no bugs are introduced by hardware issues. I would love to use GPU with ECC, but they are ridiculously priced, so I'm out of luck. That's not a real need, of course, it's just some kind of whim, but if I can pay for it, why not. Just like those crazy overclocker dudes pay for their whims.
- grishka 6y agoDumb question. Why would one want ECC in something that isn't a server? How often do bits in memory actually flip by themselves for it to be warranted?
- JoeAltmaier 6y agohttps://stackoverflow.com/questions/4109218/do-gamma-rays-from-the-sun-really-flip-bits-every-once-in-a-while https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4109218/do-gamma-rays-fr... tl;dr: one bit error in 4GB every 72 hours
- coder543 6y agoI wish someone with a larger server farm would count the number of reported ECC errors per GB-hour and give us updated numbers. That StackOverflow question is about 10 years old now, and I think it's relying on data even older than that.
- bentcorner 6y agoSomeone once did a bit-squatting experiment and "estimates that 614,400 memory errors occur per hour globally". https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/08/10/bh-2011-bit-squatting-dns-hijacking-without-exploitation/ https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/08/10/bh-2011-bit-squa... It would be interesting to repeat this experiment today.
- moonchild 6y agoYes; per the internet archive[1], the data's at least 20 years old. 1. https://web.archive.org/web/20010612184424/http://www.boeing.com/assocproducts/radiationlab/publications/SEU_at_Ground_Level.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20010612184424/http://www.boeing...
- effie 6y agoGood question. Most people don't really need it, as systems work quite well for long enough time without it and no visible corruption happens. But if you are tech enthusiast who knows a thing or two about errors then you want it, because it makes your system "serious"-grade. It boosts your confidence in quality of your system, and thus self-confidence, ego and bragging rights. Also, it makes your system more professional-grade, where you can monitor ECC errors and, if needed, replace RAM modules or motherboard.
- NorwegianDude 6y agoYou do have to pick a motherboard that supports it, but when you do, it should work without issues as long as your CPU supports it. Not all ryzen CPUs support ECC. Here is an example: ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE
- ptx 6y agoAside from that one example, are there others? I'm not a fan of its fan.
- f311a 6y agoIt's not that simple for computing. I heard that in Data Science Intel is still preferred because of better AVX support. There are also things like Intel MKL. A lot of software can use it when compiled on a user machine.
- Const-me 6y ago> is still preferred because of better AVX support AVX1 and AVX2 performance is on par. For instance, vmulpd AVX1 instruction is faster on AMD, 3 versus 4 cycles. vpaddd AVX2 instruction is same at 1 cycle latency. vfmadd132pd FMA instruction is slightly faster on Intel, 4 versus 5 cycles. Throughput is the same across these two. I was looking at AMD Zen2 versus Intel Ice Lake. Some Intel chips have AVX512. Still, many practical applications don’t need that amount of SIMD wideness, and these who do are often a good fit for GPGPUs. > There are also things like Intel MKL There’re vendor-agnostic equivalents like Eigen.
- f311a 6y agoFor some computer vision tasks, Tensorflow is much faster when you have AVX512. Also https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/artificial-intelligence/posts/tensorflow-optimizations-intel-xeon-scalable-processor.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/artificial-intellige...
- Const-me 6y agoThese results were achieved on dual-socket Xeon E5 2699v4 (the architecture is 5 years old and has no AVX512, they optimized for AVX2) and on Xeon Phi 7250 (that thing does have AVX512 but that’s not a processor, a specialized accelerator with 68 cores). Also Tensorflow is awesome fit for GPGPUs and is usually way faster on them.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y agoIIUC, Intel uses the term "AVX-512" as an umbrella term, and different processors support different subsets of "AVX-512" instructions [0]. AFAIK this is a break from previous Intel nomenclature, where any processor supporting e.g. "SSE4.2" instructions was guaranteed to support all SSE4.2 instructions. I'm concerned that sometimes this causes confusion when talking about processor -- software compatibility. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512
- mhh__ 6y agoFor a normal machine that does look to be the case but I've always found AMDs manuals and software quite lacking so it may be worth going with intel just for the tooling (i.e. performance counters seem to be much better documented on intel)
- joshstrange 6y agoI'm searching now but does AMD have an alternative/answer for Intel's QuickSync? Turning on HW acceleration on my Plex server (so that it uses QuickSync) is a game changer. From struggling to handle 3+ 1080p streams and pegging all the cores to being able to do 6+ without going over a load average of 1.
- Thaxll 6y agoWhen you have 24 "HT" cores I'm not sure why you would need QuickSync.
- Const-me 6y agoBecause video resolution has grown well above 1080p. I’m looking at 4k monitor at the moment, recent chips have some support for 8k video.
- lotyrin 6y agoBecause in addition to theoretical capacities I also care about my power bill and how comfortably cool the room my transcoding machine is in stays.
- Const-me 6y agoVideo encoders/decoders are parts of GPUs, not CPUs. Only CPUs with integrated GPU have these pieces of hardware. AMD is pretty comparable in that regard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Core_Next https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Core_Next but I don’t have computers with AMD APUs or GPUs, and don’t have a hands-on experience with these features.
- joshstrange 6y agoHmm, looks like Plex doesn't have support for Video Core Next yet: https://forums.plex.tv/t/feature-request-add-support-for-amds-video-core-next-encoding/226861/35 https://forums.plex.tv/t/feature-request-add-support-for-amd... I'm still probably 3-6mo away from a new server build so I'll just re-evaluate then I guess and honestly I might just go with another storage server and leave my intel/QS server as-is and just go with a AMD that plays nice with UnRaid.