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> And though ECC is not disabled in Ryzen CPUs, AFAIK it's not tested in (or advertised for) those ECC isn't validated by AMD for AM4 Ryzen models, but it's pr

> And though ECC is not disabled in Ryzen CPUs, AFAIK it's not tested in (or advertised for) those ECC isn't validated by AMD for AM4 Ryzen models, but it's present and supported if the motherboard also supports it. Many motherboards have ECC support (the manual will say for sure), and a handful of models even explicitly advertise it as a feature. I have a Ryzen 9 3900X on an ASRock B450M Pro4 and 64 GB of ECC DRAM, and ECC functionality is active and working.

colejohnson66 6y ago
What do you mean by “validated”? There’s the silicon, but they don’t test it?
- Laforet 6y ago
  More like "The feature is present in silicon but motherboard makers are not required to turn it on". At the end of the day, ECC support does require extra copper traces in the PCB and some low end models may deliberately choose to skip them, thus the expectation has to be managed.
- loeg 6y ago
  IMO, "validated" is intentionally wishy-washy and mostly means that AMD would prefer it if enterprises paid them more money by buying EPYC (or Ryzen Pro) parts instead of consumer Ryzen parts. Much like how Intel prefers selling higher-margin Xeons over Core i5. It's market segmentation, but friendlier to consumers than Intel's approach.
- jsmith45 6y ago
  My (largely unfounded) understanding is that this means they don't don't run the consumer chip configurations though a battery of compatibility tests with with various memory modules on a reference motherboard. My understanding is that they run these steps for each stepping or significant process change for their. Secondly, it probably also means that they do not include tests for this functionality when they perform the final tests against each fully assembled chip. I'd expect that a jtag boundary scan does verify that the bond wires are in place and work, but no functional tests of ECC are run on each processor in the consumer configuration. The net result is that with a compatible motherboard and memory, ECC almost certainly works (since the memory controller is the same as in the supported model) but AMD does not officially guarantee it. It is much like overclocking. The functionality is present, and it should work, and most likely does, but AMD accepts no responsibility if it does not, since they don't formally test for it.

colejohnson66 6y ago

What do you mean by “validated”? There’s the silicon, but they don’t test it?

Laforet 6y ago
More like "The feature is present in silicon but motherboard makers are not required to turn it on". At the end of the day, ECC support does require extra copper traces in the PCB and some low end models may deliberately choose to skip them, thus the expectation has to be managed.
loeg 6y ago
IMO, "validated" is intentionally wishy-washy and mostly means that AMD would prefer it if enterprises paid them more money by buying EPYC (or Ryzen Pro) parts instead of consumer Ryzen parts. Much like how Intel prefers selling higher-margin Xeons over Core i5. It's market segmentation, but friendlier to consumers than Intel's approach.
jsmith45 6y ago
My (largely unfounded) understanding is that this means they don't don't run the consumer chip configurations though a battery of compatibility tests with with various memory modules on a reference motherboard. My understanding is that they run these steps for each stepping or significant process change for their. Secondly, it probably also means that they do not include tests for this functionality when they perform the final tests against each fully assembled chip. I'd expect that a jtag boundary scan does verify that the bond wires are in place and work, but no functional tests of ECC are run on each processor in the consumer configuration. The net result is that with a compatible motherboard and memory, ECC almost certainly works (since the memory controller is the same as in the supported model) but AMD does not officially guarantee it. It is much like overclocking. The functionality is present, and it should work, and most likely does, but AMD accepts no responsibility if it does not, since they don't formally test for it.