4 ms·

This inertia holding ECC away from desktops is just so dumb. As if me doing banking, taxes and everything else on desktop is less important than some server hos

by zokier 3y ago

This inertia holding ECC away from desktops is just so dumb. As if me doing banking, taxes and everything else on desktop is less important than some server hosting cat pictures. Or as if ECC would truly represent any meaningful part on higher end system total cost. Or as if I would even have the option of simply paying some premium to get ECC, when in practice desktop Xeon availability and selection are both extremely limited. Of course the benefit of ECC can be debated. But it seems such a waste to bother debating it when Intel could just make the whole thing a non-issue by a flick of a switch.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
The entire computing industry is based on trading-off the probability & effects of failure with cost. Why would you even bother with ECC when practically no one except maybe server farms with tens of 24h-on servers would notice a thing? Even a single micro-cent per device spent on improving testing would have a much more felt-through effect on the entire computing landscape.
- kiririn 3y ago
  For desktop computers most of the value of ECC comes from not corrupting your hard disk when a ram stick spontaneously goes bad, rather than protecting against once in a blue moon bit flips
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    ECC is kind of useless when a RAM stick "spontaneously goes bad", unless precisely you are talking about the situation where a single bit goes bad (which is, indeed, less than once in a blue moon).
    - kiririn 3y ago
      It will spew warnings if correctly setup and may even be able to correct for the fault. Anything that highlights the problem before your unstable system silently corrupts files (and their backups) or hoses its filesystem is a godsend
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  This one does pervasive damage to software quality though. You get a bug report, it doesn't reproduce easily. The thought is always there: "maybe their hardware had a transient error?". If it did you have no bug to find. That's attractive. If storage drives reported writes accurately and memory didn't occasionally silently corrupt, software falling over would be more likely to imply an error the developer is empowered to fix.
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    ECC RAM doesn't prevent _all_ hardware transient errors. It doesn't even prevent the majority of them. But whenever you get a bug report, is really the first thing that comes to mind "maybe their hardware had a transient error?"? The amount of software vs hardware bugs is still like a thousand to one, and that's _even_ for companies which receive a disproportionate amount of hardware errors (like OS vendors). For regular software, I'd bet it's a couple million to one.
JonChesterfield 3y ago
It's market segmentation. You want to sell expensive chips to people with money and cheap ones to people without. That's hard to do if the products seem to be equivalent. ECC availability is part of the marketing skill with which people buy Xeon branded processors. This isn't inherently evil behaviour. AMD is interesting in this regard. ECC on desktops. Lots of x86 chips have some integrated GPU. Lots of PCIe lanes. The idea seems to be biased much more towards build a great platform, as opposed to build a great profit margin.
- paulmd 3y ago
  Ecc is still segmented on the amd apu lineup, including desktop models (and for many years these were the only models with integrated graphics!), and there literally is no way for consumers to even buy some of the parts that AMD has segmented these features to. So there is not some moral imperative that AMD has undertaken here - AMD backs my "right" to ECC right up until I want to use it on a 5700G, or buy a 5750G Pro, which they won't even sell to me as a consumer! (just like AMD also segmented based on SMT up through at least the ryzen 4000 series despite the fans bashing intel for the same, lol) Moreover, with amd one increasingly has to worry about the platform lock, which is an absolutely obscene e-waste stream AMD has created to reduce the secondhand sales market. This isn’t limited to server CPUs or pro CPUs, notionally it affects all CPUs that might have ever passed through an oem system, including non-pro consumer CPUs etc. https://youtu.be/bFNJVaO9E-o?t=420 https://youtu.be/bFNJVaO9E-o?t=420 The stated reason is security/antitheft, but the platform lock doesn't lock a CPU to a motherboard, it locks it to a brand. So if someone has physical access to your server rack and wants to steal the CPU, they just have to find a lenovo-branded or hp-branded chip to swap it out with... and there are rivers of those because locked chips are essentially treated as e-waste. What it does do very successfully is throw a whole cloud of confusion and pain over the secondhand market and drive these to be scrapped etc and push sales of new devices instead. AMD could very easily have implemented a lock/unlock system using non-volatile storage or simple e-fuse even/odd counting (limited number of locks/unlocks, granted, but it carries with the CPU not the mobo, and how many systems is the average CPU used in?). They, naturally, chose the one that is permanent but bricks the cpu for everyone else, but which also doesn't really fully prevent CPU swapping attacks either. Plenty of e-fuses to spare for detecting memory overclocking though - we all know denying warranties comes first ;) For the type of person who gets wound up about the moral imperative of ecc, that’s not exactly what you want to see from AMD either. First 2 Rs are "reduce" and "re-use", followed by "recycle". Like how about we don't tivoize the cpu in 2018 or whatever? Secondhand sales are just as much of a moral right and AMD is really having the old college try at taking that away, and frankly a lot more impactful to the average user. I strongly wish the EU would step in and ban this practice. This is not a good/healthy path, it would actually be really bad if everyone was doing this on their products. Also, Intel has ECC support on the upper half of their range. Yes, it requires motherboard support, but you also have to pick and choose with AMD because only a handful of motherboards actually support/validate it anyway. Plus with AMD you have the fTPM issue (and very few of the premium creator boards/etc have external TPM headers). This is the reality as a homelab owner - you have to pick your hardware very carefully regardless of brand, a random B650 board probably is not going to report errors and may not even detect them. And while it may work on any given BIOS, it may stop working at any future point, whether intentionally or not.

by zokier 3y ago

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

The entire computing industry is based on trading-off the probability & effects of failure with cost. Why would you even bother with ECC when practically no one except maybe server farms with tens of 24h-on servers would notice a thing? Even a single micro-cent per device spent on improving testing would have a much more felt-through effect on the entire computing landscape.

kiririn 3y ago
For desktop computers most of the value of ECC comes from not corrupting your hard disk when a ram stick spontaneously goes bad, rather than protecting against once in a blue moon bit flips
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  ECC is kind of useless when a RAM stick "spontaneously goes bad", unless precisely you are talking about the situation where a single bit goes bad (which is, indeed, less than once in a blue moon).
  - kiririn 3y ago
    It will spew warnings if correctly setup and may even be able to correct for the fault. Anything that highlights the problem before your unstable system silently corrupts files (and their backups) or hoses its filesystem is a godsend
JonChesterfield 3y ago
This one does pervasive damage to software quality though. You get a bug report, it doesn't reproduce easily. The thought is always there: "maybe their hardware had a transient error?". If it did you have no bug to find. That's attractive. If storage drives reported writes accurately and memory didn't occasionally silently corrupt, software falling over would be more likely to imply an error the developer is empowered to fix.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  ECC RAM doesn't prevent _all_ hardware transient errors. It doesn't even prevent the majority of them. But whenever you get a bug report, is really the first thing that comes to mind "maybe their hardware had a transient error?"? The amount of software vs hardware bugs is still like a thousand to one, and that's _even_ for companies which receive a disproportionate amount of hardware errors (like OS vendors). For regular software, I'd bet it's a couple million to one.

JonChesterfield 3y ago

It's market segmentation. You want to sell expensive chips to people with money and cheap ones to people without. That's hard to do if the products seem to be equivalent. ECC availability is part of the marketing skill with which people buy Xeon branded processors. This isn't inherently evil behaviour. AMD is interesting in this regard. ECC on desktops. Lots of x86 chips have some integrated GPU. Lots of PCIe lanes. The idea seems to be biased much more towards build a great platform, as opposed to build a great profit margin.

paulmd 3y ago
Ecc is still segmented on the amd apu lineup, including desktop models (and for many years these were the only models with integrated graphics!), and there literally is no way for consumers to even buy some of the parts that AMD has segmented these features to. So there is not some moral imperative that AMD has undertaken here - AMD backs my "right" to ECC right up until I want to use it on a 5700G, or buy a 5750G Pro, which they won't even sell to me as a consumer! (just like AMD also segmented based on SMT up through at least the ryzen 4000 series despite the fans bashing intel for the same, lol) Moreover, with amd one increasingly has to worry about the platform lock, which is an absolutely obscene e-waste stream AMD has created to reduce the secondhand sales market. This isn’t limited to server CPUs or pro CPUs, notionally it affects all CPUs that might have ever passed through an oem system, including non-pro consumer CPUs etc. https://youtu.be/bFNJVaO9E-o?t=420 https://youtu.be/bFNJVaO9E-o?t=420 The stated reason is security/antitheft, but the platform lock doesn't lock a CPU to a motherboard, it locks it to a brand. So if someone has physical access to your server rack and wants to steal the CPU, they just have to find a lenovo-branded or hp-branded chip to swap it out with... and there are rivers of those because locked chips are essentially treated as e-waste. What it does do very successfully is throw a whole cloud of confusion and pain over the secondhand market and drive these to be scrapped etc and push sales of new devices instead. AMD could very easily have implemented a lock/unlock system using non-volatile storage or simple e-fuse even/odd counting (limited number of locks/unlocks, granted, but it carries with the CPU not the mobo, and how many systems is the average CPU used in?). They, naturally, chose the one that is permanent but bricks the cpu for everyone else, but which also doesn't really fully prevent CPU swapping attacks either. Plenty of e-fuses to spare for detecting memory overclocking though - we all know denying warranties comes first ;) For the type of person who gets wound up about the moral imperative of ecc, that’s not exactly what you want to see from AMD either. First 2 Rs are "reduce" and "re-use", followed by "recycle". Like how about we don't tivoize the cpu in 2018 or whatever? Secondhand sales are just as much of a moral right and AMD is really having the old college try at taking that away, and frankly a lot more impactful to the average user. I strongly wish the EU would step in and ban this practice. This is not a good/healthy path, it would actually be really bad if everyone was doing this on their products. Also, Intel has ECC support on the upper half of their range. Yes, it requires motherboard support, but you also have to pick and choose with AMD because only a handful of motherboards actually support/validate it anyway. Plus with AMD you have the fTPM issue (and very few of the premium creator boards/etc have external TPM headers). This is the reality as a homelab owner - you have to pick your hardware very carefully regardless of brand, a random B650 board probably is not going to report errors and may not even detect them. And while it may work on any given BIOS, it may stop working at any future point, whether intentionally or not.