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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 NA

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 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.