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Your comments about AMD are not entirely true: AMD officially supports ECC in the Pro variants of their desktop CPUs / APUs. I'm currently using a Ryzen 3800X

by bcrl 5y ago

Your comments about AMD are not entirely true: AMD officially supports ECC in the Pro variants of their desktop CPUs / APUs. I'm currently using a Ryzen 3800X with ECC memory and EDAC reports that it's working. ASRock lists qualified ECC DIMMs for virtually all of their motherboards. It's more that it's a feature motherboard vendors can support if they want to rather than being a platform requirement. But yes, it is sad that AMD doesn't make it an officially supported feature of the platform.

theevilsharpie 5y ago
> AMD officially supports ECC in the Pro variants of their desktop CPUs / APUs ECC is only officially supported on the Ryzen Threadripper PRO, and that's largely because it uses registered memory which will practically always have ECC capability. Regular Ryzen PRO CPUs have the same ECC support as non-PRO Ryzen CPUs: functional, but not validated by AMD. Ryzen PRO APUs have (non-validated) support for ECC, whereas non-PRO APUs don't support ECC at all.
sliken 5y ago
Right, but sadly AMD Ryzen Pro aren't sold directly to consumers (well unless you buy grey market on ebay), even if they did there's no such thing as a Ryzen Pro motherboard, or a Ryzen Pro BIOS. Not to mention AMD has been slow to upstream various EDAC related kernel patches. It's not really a supported config, there's no guarantee it will work, no promise from AMD (other than it's not disabled), and you can't return a Ryzen CPU because the ECC doesn't work. Various tests from various reddit posts show that some vendors "qualify" ECC dimms as working (an inserted Dimm increases ram available), some correct bits but don't correctly tell the kernel, and others actually do correct and report. So it's basically just a big mess. I'd buy an Epyc, but sadly unlike Intel the premium for a "server" chip is huge, if you can find them anywhere near MSRP. I looked for a Epyc 7313p near MRSP (announced in March 2021) without luck and finally gave up and bought a Ryzen. With all that said, ASRock is from what I can tell the best AMD motherboard company to support ECC with AMD. I've got a ASRock X570D4U, other than it refusing to allow sharing a IPMI/BMC interface with the system, I'm pretty happy with it.

by bcrl 5y ago

theevilsharpie 5y ago

> AMD officially supports ECC in the Pro variants of their desktop CPUs / APUs ECC is only officially supported on the Ryzen Threadripper PRO, and that's largely because it uses registered memory which will practically always have ECC capability. Regular Ryzen PRO CPUs have the same ECC support as non-PRO Ryzen CPUs: functional, but not validated by AMD. Ryzen PRO APUs have (non-validated) support for ECC, whereas non-PRO APUs don't support ECC at all.

sliken 5y ago

Right, but sadly AMD Ryzen Pro aren't sold directly to consumers (well unless you buy grey market on ebay), even if they did there's no such thing as a Ryzen Pro motherboard, or a Ryzen Pro BIOS. Not to mention AMD has been slow to upstream various EDAC related kernel patches. It's not really a supported config, there's no guarantee it will work, no promise from AMD (other than it's not disabled), and you can't return a Ryzen CPU because the ECC doesn't work. Various tests from various reddit posts show that some vendors "qualify" ECC dimms as working (an inserted Dimm increases ram available), some correct bits but don't correctly tell the kernel, and others actually do correct and report. So it's basically just a big mess. I'd buy an Epyc, but sadly unlike Intel the premium for a "server" chip is huge, if you can find them anywhere near MSRP. I looked for a Epyc 7313p near MRSP (announced in March 2021) without luck and finally gave up and bought a Ryzen. With all that said, ASRock is from what I can tell the best AMD motherboard company to support ECC with AMD. I've got a ASRock X570D4U, other than it refusing to allow sharing a IPMI/BMC interface with the system, I'm pretty happy with it.