4 ms·

Why do we never see such cheap, low-wattage CPUs with ECC memory controllers? There’s absolutely a market for these, starting with home NAS and generic servers.

by cromka 2y ago

Why do we never see such cheap, low-wattage CPUs with ECC memory controllers? There’s absolutely a market for these, starting with home NAS and generic servers. I just don’t get it, such a missed opportunity here!

johnklos 2y ago
True. I've wondered the same thing, and always come back to inexpensive Ryzens on ASRock motherboards that I simply underclock.
- benoau 2y ago
  We're kind of stumbling into a golden age of home NAS devices and while there aren't any ready-to-go ECC options yet, you can buy lovely little cases to support your own components. I think we'll surely see ECC in the next generation of AOOSTAR and similar devices, nobody making these devices has any motivation to never implement ECC.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    How exactly are companies like AOOSTAR going to implement ECC if it's not supported by the CPU vendor (which is Intel)? AMD CPUs are useless for these home NAS devices if your goal is to build a low-power media server, which I think is one of the main use-cases (why else would you want to store tens of terabytes of data at home?).
    - benoau 2y ago
      ECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th) and before that for AMD I think, so it is only a matter of time before this trickles down into the little NAS boxes.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        >ECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th) It is? How so? I don't see it anywhere outside their server and embedded products. The server-grade stuff isn't appropriate for "the little NAS boxes" used at home because of both expense and more importantly power consumption, and the embedded stuff just isn't really available to consumers (so it might be potentially great for a company like Synology that builds consumer-friendly pre-built NAS boxes running on proprietary software, but it's not useful to people building their own DIY NAS boxes running open-source software).
        sirn 2y ago
        ECC is supported on any higher end 12th/13th Gen, but it's locked behind a chipset feature lock. If you can find any board that uses W680 (e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569), then it's possible to use ECC UDIMM on Intel Core and have ECC detected/reported.
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        >e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569 Yeah, that cost puts it out of reach for the typical home users building relatively inexpensive little DIY media server boxes, and places it firmly in "server" territory. A standard motherboard for these CPUs (typically using a B760 chipset) is a very small fraction of that cost. It's good to know this factoid, but it still basically supports my prior assertion that on Intel, ECC support is basically only for servers.
    - justinclift 2y ago
      The very old HP Microserver Gen7's used a low power AMD cpu, as did the original Gen10 model. The Gen7 things would never be useful for transcoding on cpu though, waaaaaay too underpowered. But they did have a PCIe slot for add-in cards (ie small gpu or network card).
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        Of course you can add a GPU card on the PCIe slot, but this 1) takes away a slot, and PCIe lanes, that you might want to use for connecting storage devices (such as a SATA HBA card), and 2) this will probably poorly affect your system's overall power consumption, which is a big factor for home users building NAS/media server boxes. Intel's QuickSync performs extremely well, with very low power (esp at idle) for 4k transcoding, for very low cost, while not needing any PCIe lanes; it's why these CPUs are so popular for this application. Unfortunately, Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips, so that's a big drawback, as ECC is really useful for a storage server (or really anywhere).
        justinclift 2y ago
        > Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips They at least used to support ECC on some models of i3 chips as well. My understanding was that was specifically to support ECC on lower power NAS systems. Random examples: • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/90729/intel-core-i3-6100-processor-3m-cache-3-70-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/90729/i... (6th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97455/intel-core-i3-7100-processor-3m-cache-3-90-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97455/i... (7th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/129944/intel-core-i3-8100t-processor-6m-cache-3-10-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/129944/... (8th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/190886/intel-core-i3-9100f-processor-6m-cache-up-to-4-20-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/190886/... (9th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/203899/intel-core-i3-10100te-processor-6m-cache-up-to-3-60-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/203899/... (10th gen i3) Looking over random i3 pages from 11th gen onwards though, I'm not even seeing ECC mentioned on the pages at all. It's not a "yes/no" item like on the older generation ones pages, it's completely absent (from the ones I just checked). :(
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  The problem with those inexpensive Ryzens is that they don't have iGPUs with Intel QuickSync so they can't transcode video with high efficiency. This makes them unsuitable for use for media servers, which is what a lot of people are doing with these chips these days: building home NAS/media servers that combine both functions into a single, small, low-power unit. You put a bunch of HDDs in it so you can store tens of terabytes of movies using RAID to protect against drive failures, and run Jellyfin or Plex on it. Plus you can use the box for other regular NAS tasks too, as well as many other convenient applications. Intel chips are virtually required here since AMD chips are useless for transcoding, and require external GPU cards which destroy the system's power efficiency which was one of the main points of getting one of these low-power Intel chips in the first place.
  - Teever 2y ago
    Doesn't AMD make Ryzens that also have iGPUs that work with jellyfin/plex transcoding?
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      From what I've read, the AMD offerings here are not at all competitive with Intel's QuickSync.
      - adrian_b 2y ago
        While Intel QuickSync remains faster in CPUs of the same generation with AMD, the AMD laptop CPUs starting with Phoenix (Ryzen 7440/7540/7640/7840/7940) have made a great jump in the video encoding/decoding speed, exceeding the older Intel CPUs, and they should be suitable for any such application. There are a huge number of models of cheap small NUC-like computers with AMD Phoenix or Hawk Point (Ryzen 8000 series) CPUs.
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        Good to know!
  - 2y ago
gorgoiler 2y ago
I saw this $390 Ryzen NAS enclosure yesterday but it’s never clear with these configurations if the motherboard supports ECC, even if the CPU does: https://liliputing.com/aoostar-launches-a-ryzen-7-5825u-version-of-the-wtr-pro-4-bay-nas/ https://liliputing.com/aoostar-launches-a-ryzen-7-5825u-vers...
MBCook 2y ago
Intel uses ECC as a differentiator between consumer chips and server chips (and pro-sumer?) They’d never do that. They SHOULD. Everyone had too much memory and it’s too dense. We should all have ECC by now. Unless AMD does it I don’t think it will happen. Even if they do I feel like OEMs wouldn’t want it because memory would suddenly cost 2¢ per GB (or whatever) and refuse.
- cromka 2y ago
  AMD does it in their embedded low-voltage CPUs, which are not easy to be found in regular applications. V2000 and V3000 series have 10W TDP versions. Any ATX solutions are super expensive: https://solidrun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/developer/pages/592904196/HoneyComb+AMD+V3000+mini+ITX+Quick+Start+Guide#SFP-Modules https://solidrun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/developer/pages/5...
- cromka 2y ago
  Intel actually did add ECC in their Atoms, see C3000 for example: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/atom/c-series/c3000-family-brief.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/proces...
- cam_l 2y ago
  I wonder how ibecc compares with real ecc, now that it's supported for these lower spec chips. Will it help at all or is it a waste of time?
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    It reduces the memory capacity and the memory performance, in comparison with real ECC. Nevertheless, this will rarely matter for the kind of applications typically run on small computers with Atom CPUs, which are rarely more demanding than a router/firewall or a network-attached storage server. You can see examples of performance decrease with IBECC here: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-review-intel-n97-nas-kit-fanless-sbc-ubuntu-24-04/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-revie... For most applications the performance decrease should be less than 10%. The Intel IBECC controller includes a special cache memory, to decrease the number of additional memory accesses required by IBECC. Otherwise the memory performance would have been halved.
sirn 2y ago
Some N100 do have In-Band ECC (which uses the same data lane as regular memory channel, so less usable memory space/effective memory bandwidth), such as the Beelink S12 Pro box (DDR4) and is recognized by EDAC subsystem on Linux. [ 8.485808] [ T703] caller igen6_probe+0x138/0x780 [igen6_edac] mapping multiple BARs [ 8.487601] [ T703] EDAC MC0: Giving out device to module igen6_edac controller Intel_client_SoC MC#0: DEV 0000:00:00.0 (INTERRUPT) [ 8.487625] [ T67] EDAC igen6 MC0: HANDLING IBECC MEMORY ERROR [ 8.487626] [ T67] EDAC igen6 MC0: ADDR 0x7fffffffe0 [ 8.487664] [ T703] EDAC igen6: v2.5.1
- cromka 2y ago
  DDR5 has in-band ECC by default on all platforms, though.
  - sirn 2y ago
    DDR5 doesn't have an In-Band ECC. What they have is On-Die ECC, and is not visible to the memory controller (i.e. error information won't be reported by EDAC), and only corrects 1-bit when they're stored/retrieved, where Side-Band ECC (regular ECC) and In-Band ECC can correct 1-bit and detect 2-bits, and can also correct/detect memory corruption during transit.
    - cromka 2y ago
      Ohhh right, right, I had them mixed up! Thanks for the clarification.
znpy 2y ago
I'd rather start seeing ipmi-like controllers rather than ecc memory on high-end/prosumer hardware.
adrian_b 2y ago
The Alder Lake N CPUs have in-band ECC memory controllers, because they are also sold as Atom CPUs for industrial applications. I do not know if the IBECC controller is functional in all models, but it is usable at least in the models that are marked by Intel (in Intel Ark) as suitable for embedded use, like N97 and i3-N305. The IBECC controller requires BIOS support. Among the computers known to have BIOS support for IBECC is ODROID H4/H4+/H4 Ultra (the 3 models differ in the CPU model or the number of Ethernet ports and SATA support). IBECC works with non-ECC DDR5 or LPDDR5 memories, but it reduces the available memory capacity and performance in comparison with traditional ECC. Because no memory vendor offers LPDDR memory with ECC, IBECC is the only way to implement ECC in the CPUs like Alder Lake N or Amston Lake, which are intended to be used with LPDDR5 memory.

by cromka 2y ago

johnklos 2y ago

True. I've wondered the same thing, and always come back to inexpensive Ryzens on ASRock motherboards that I simply underclock.

benoau 2y ago
We're kind of stumbling into a golden age of home NAS devices and while there aren't any ready-to-go ECC options yet, you can buy lovely little cases to support your own components. I think we'll surely see ECC in the next generation of AOOSTAR and similar devices, nobody making these devices has any motivation to never implement ECC.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  How exactly are companies like AOOSTAR going to implement ECC if it's not supported by the CPU vendor (which is Intel)? AMD CPUs are useless for these home NAS devices if your goal is to build a low-power media server, which I think is one of the main use-cases (why else would you want to store tens of terabytes of data at home?).
  - benoau 2y ago
    ECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th) and before that for AMD I think, so it is only a matter of time before this trickles down into the little NAS boxes.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >ECC has been growing in support since ~12th generation Intel (currently 14th) It is? How so? I don't see it anywhere outside their server and embedded products. The server-grade stuff isn't appropriate for "the little NAS boxes" used at home because of both expense and more importantly power consumption, and the embedded stuff just isn't really available to consumers (so it might be potentially great for a company like Synology that builds consumer-friendly pre-built NAS boxes running on proprietary software, but it's not useful to people building their own DIY NAS boxes running open-source software).
      - sirn 2y ago
        ECC is supported on any higher end 12th/13th Gen, but it's locked behind a chipset feature lock. If you can find any board that uses W680 (e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569), then it's possible to use ECC UDIMM on Intel Core and have ECC detected/reported.
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        >e.g. W680D4U-2L2T which can be had on Amazon for $569 Yeah, that cost puts it out of reach for the typical home users building relatively inexpensive little DIY media server boxes, and places it firmly in "server" territory. A standard motherboard for these CPUs (typically using a B760 chipset) is a very small fraction of that cost. It's good to know this factoid, but it still basically supports my prior assertion that on Intel, ECC support is basically only for servers.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    The very old HP Microserver Gen7's used a low power AMD cpu, as did the original Gen10 model. The Gen7 things would never be useful for transcoding on cpu though, waaaaaay too underpowered. But they did have a PCIe slot for add-in cards (ie small gpu or network card).
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      Of course you can add a GPU card on the PCIe slot, but this 1) takes away a slot, and PCIe lanes, that you might want to use for connecting storage devices (such as a SATA HBA card), and 2) this will probably poorly affect your system's overall power consumption, which is a big factor for home users building NAS/media server boxes. Intel's QuickSync performs extremely well, with very low power (esp at idle) for 4k transcoding, for very low cost, while not needing any PCIe lanes; it's why these CPUs are so popular for this application. Unfortunately, Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips, so that's a big drawback, as ECC is really useful for a storage server (or really anywhere).
      - justinclift 2y ago
        > Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips They at least used to support ECC on some models of i3 chips as well. My understanding was that was specifically to support ECC on lower power NAS systems. Random examples: • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/90729/intel-core-i3-6100-processor-3m-cache-3-70-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/90729/i... (6th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97455/intel-core-i3-7100-processor-3m-cache-3-90-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97455/i... (7th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/129944/intel-core-i3-8100t-processor-6m-cache-3-10-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/129944/... (8th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/190886/intel-core-i3-9100f-processor-6m-cache-up-to-4-20-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/190886/... (9th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/203899/intel-core-i3-10100te-processor-6m-cache-up-to-3-60-ghz.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/203899/... (10th gen i3) Looking over random i3 pages from 11th gen onwards though, I'm not even seeing ECC mentioned on the pages at all. It's not a "yes/no" item like on the older generation ones pages, it's completely absent (from the ones I just checked). :(
shiroiushi 2y ago
The problem with those inexpensive Ryzens is that they don't have iGPUs with Intel QuickSync so they can't transcode video with high efficiency. This makes them unsuitable for use for media servers, which is what a lot of people are doing with these chips these days: building home NAS/media servers that combine both functions into a single, small, low-power unit. You put a bunch of HDDs in it so you can store tens of terabytes of movies using RAID to protect against drive failures, and run Jellyfin or Plex on it. Plus you can use the box for other regular NAS tasks too, as well as many other convenient applications. Intel chips are virtually required here since AMD chips are useless for transcoding, and require external GPU cards which destroy the system's power efficiency which was one of the main points of getting one of these low-power Intel chips in the first place.
- Teever 2y ago
  Doesn't AMD make Ryzens that also have iGPUs that work with jellyfin/plex transcoding?
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    From what I've read, the AMD offerings here are not at all competitive with Intel's QuickSync.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      While Intel QuickSync remains faster in CPUs of the same generation with AMD, the AMD laptop CPUs starting with Phoenix (Ryzen 7440/7540/7640/7840/7940) have made a great jump in the video encoding/decoding speed, exceeding the older Intel CPUs, and they should be suitable for any such application. There are a huge number of models of cheap small NUC-like computers with AMD Phoenix or Hawk Point (Ryzen 8000 series) CPUs.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        Good to know!
- 2y ago

gorgoiler 2y ago

I saw this $390 Ryzen NAS enclosure yesterday but it’s never clear with these configurations if the motherboard supports ECC, even if the CPU does: https://liliputing.com/aoostar-launches-a-ryzen-7-5825u-version-of-the-wtr-pro-4-bay-nas/ https://liliputing.com/aoostar-launches-a-ryzen-7-5825u-vers...

MBCook 2y ago

Intel uses ECC as a differentiator between consumer chips and server chips (and pro-sumer?) They’d never do that. They SHOULD. Everyone had too much memory and it’s too dense. We should all have ECC by now. Unless AMD does it I don’t think it will happen. Even if they do I feel like OEMs wouldn’t want it because memory would suddenly cost 2¢ per GB (or whatever) and refuse.

cromka 2y ago
AMD does it in their embedded low-voltage CPUs, which are not easy to be found in regular applications. V2000 and V3000 series have 10W TDP versions. Any ATX solutions are super expensive: https://solidrun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/developer/pages/592904196/HoneyComb+AMD+V3000+mini+ITX+Quick+Start+Guide#SFP-Modules https://solidrun.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/developer/pages/5...
cromka 2y ago
Intel actually did add ECC in their Atoms, see C3000 for example: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/atom/c-series/c3000-family-brief.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/proces...
cam_l 2y ago
I wonder how ibecc compares with real ecc, now that it's supported for these lower spec chips. Will it help at all or is it a waste of time?
- adrian_b 2y ago
  It reduces the memory capacity and the memory performance, in comparison with real ECC. Nevertheless, this will rarely matter for the kind of applications typically run on small computers with Atom CPUs, which are rarely more demanding than a router/firewall or a network-attached storage server. You can see examples of performance decrease with IBECC here: https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-review-intel-n97-nas-kit-fanless-sbc-ubuntu-24-04/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/05/26/odroid-h4-plus-revie... For most applications the performance decrease should be less than 10%. The Intel IBECC controller includes a special cache memory, to decrease the number of additional memory accesses required by IBECC. Otherwise the memory performance would have been halved.

sirn 2y ago

Some N100 do have In-Band ECC (which uses the same data lane as regular memory channel, so less usable memory space/effective memory bandwidth), such as the Beelink S12 Pro box (DDR4) and is recognized by EDAC subsystem on Linux. [ 8.485808] [ T703] caller igen6_probe+0x138/0x780 [igen6_edac] mapping multiple BARs [ 8.487601] [ T703] EDAC MC0: Giving out device to module igen6_edac controller Intel_client_SoC MC#0: DEV 0000:00:00.0 (INTERRUPT) [ 8.487625] [ T67] EDAC igen6 MC0: HANDLING IBECC MEMORY ERROR [ 8.487626] [ T67] EDAC igen6 MC0: ADDR 0x7fffffffe0 [ 8.487664] [ T703] EDAC igen6: v2.5.1

cromka 2y ago
DDR5 has in-band ECC by default on all platforms, though.
- sirn 2y ago
  DDR5 doesn't have an In-Band ECC. What they have is On-Die ECC, and is not visible to the memory controller (i.e. error information won't be reported by EDAC), and only corrects 1-bit when they're stored/retrieved, where Side-Band ECC (regular ECC) and In-Band ECC can correct 1-bit and detect 2-bits, and can also correct/detect memory corruption during transit.
  - cromka 2y ago
    Ohhh right, right, I had them mixed up! Thanks for the clarification.

znpy 2y ago

I'd rather start seeing ipmi-like controllers rather than ecc memory on high-end/prosumer hardware.

adrian_b 2y ago

The Alder Lake N CPUs have in-band ECC memory controllers, because they are also sold as Atom CPUs for industrial applications. I do not know if the IBECC controller is functional in all models, but it is usable at least in the models that are marked by Intel (in Intel Ark) as suitable for embedded use, like N97 and i3-N305. The IBECC controller requires BIOS support. Among the computers known to have BIOS support for IBECC is ODROID H4/H4+/H4 Ultra (the 3 models differ in the CPU model or the number of Ethernet ports and SATA support). IBECC works with non-ECC DDR5 or LPDDR5 memories, but it reduces the available memory capacity and performance in comparison with traditional ECC. Because no memory vendor offers LPDDR memory with ECC, IBECC is the only way to implement ECC in the CPUs like Alder Lake N or Amston Lake, which are intended to be used with LPDDR5 memory.