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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 e

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.
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  I thought the APU chips also supported ECC though some motherboards don't. That could well be wrong though, the messaging seems quite muddied. In fairness my NAS is an intel i3 with ECC support so it's not a simple Xeon/not split there either. I remember news stories about the platform lock but haven't kept up to date, do you know how that played out in practice? My asrock board doesn't seem to have an option to burn out fuses to stop it working elsewhere but I am slightly less cavalier about changing settings knowing that might be in there.
  - paulmd 3y ago
    ECC support is segmented to Pro APUs only. Which aren't even sold to consumers. Yeah the lack of iGPU support (plex encoding, VMs, etc) pushed me to the 7100 last time I did a homeserver build. It's been muddled on intel's line forever - for a while it was only i3s (since they dropped the idea of a 2C xeon there was no reason to keep segmenting it) but then with alder lake they flipped it and it's on everything 12500 and above (except F skus). And while you do need a motherboard that supports it, W680 supports overclocking/XMP/etc - the tier of boards I'm looking at aren't materially different in cost (or actually intel often trends cheaper). The platform lock has actually affected me quite badly trying to do a ROMED8-2T build, a massive number of the desirable CPUs are platform locked and unless they explicitly say unlocked it's always a question whether any given chip is actually unlocked or just doesn't say/doesn't know. Which is what I see as the whole point - get those machines into the scrapper (zero value means nobody bothers reselling) instead of people buying perfectly good older cpus and drawing extra life from them. I am not thrilled about the idea of that bleeding into the consumer market at all. So far AMD hasn't gotten much traction with OEMs but that's changing over time, and I see every reason for AMD to incentivize OEM partners to use this functionality across their whole lineups - OEMs want cheaper chips and AMD can sell them cheaper because they know they are junk after the first sale. Why wouldn't ThinkStation SFF PCs etc come with locked processors at some point? AMD clearly has laid the groundwork and all the tooling is there and just is boiling the frog very cautiously. By the time people see the impact in the consumer market it will be too late. And there are a lot more ThinkStations and Optiplexes sold than DIY PCs.

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.

JonChesterfield 3y ago
I thought the APU chips also supported ECC though some motherboards don't. That could well be wrong though, the messaging seems quite muddied. In fairness my NAS is an intel i3 with ECC support so it's not a simple Xeon/not split there either. I remember news stories about the platform lock but haven't kept up to date, do you know how that played out in practice? My asrock board doesn't seem to have an option to burn out fuses to stop it working elsewhere but I am slightly less cavalier about changing settings knowing that might be in there.
- paulmd 3y ago
  ECC support is segmented to Pro APUs only. Which aren't even sold to consumers. Yeah the lack of iGPU support (plex encoding, VMs, etc) pushed me to the 7100 last time I did a homeserver build. It's been muddled on intel's line forever - for a while it was only i3s (since they dropped the idea of a 2C xeon there was no reason to keep segmenting it) but then with alder lake they flipped it and it's on everything 12500 and above (except F skus). And while you do need a motherboard that supports it, W680 supports overclocking/XMP/etc - the tier of boards I'm looking at aren't materially different in cost (or actually intel often trends cheaper). The platform lock has actually affected me quite badly trying to do a ROMED8-2T build, a massive number of the desirable CPUs are platform locked and unless they explicitly say unlocked it's always a question whether any given chip is actually unlocked or just doesn't say/doesn't know. Which is what I see as the whole point - get those machines into the scrapper (zero value means nobody bothers reselling) instead of people buying perfectly good older cpus and drawing extra life from them. I am not thrilled about the idea of that bleeding into the consumer market at all. So far AMD hasn't gotten much traction with OEMs but that's changing over time, and I see every reason for AMD to incentivize OEM partners to use this functionality across their whole lineups - OEMs want cheaper chips and AMD can sell them cheaper because they know they are junk after the first sale. Why wouldn't ThinkStation SFF PCs etc come with locked processors at some point? AMD clearly has laid the groundwork and all the tooling is there and just is boiling the frog very cautiously. By the time people see the impact in the consumer market it will be too late. And there are a lot more ThinkStations and Optiplexes sold than DIY PCs.