4 ms·

It's not even ECC price/availability that bothers me so much, it's that getting CPUs and motherboards that support ECC is non-trivial outside of the server spac

by loeg 8mo ago

It's not even ECC price/availability that bothers me so much, it's that getting CPUs and motherboards that support ECC is non-trivial outside of the server space. The whole consumer class ecosystem is kind of shitty. At least AMD allows consumer class CPUs to kinda sorta use ECC, unlike Intel's approach where only the prosumer/workstation stuff gets ECC.

rpcope1 8mo ago
I've been honestly amazed people actually buy stuff that's not "workstation" gear given IME how much more reliably and consistently it works, but I guess even a generation or two used can be expensive.
- loeg 8mo ago
  I've had zero issues with AMD's consumer tier of non-WX Threadripper and Ryzen models, FWIW.
- thousand_nights 8mo ago
  overblown? billions of users use consumer tier hardware just fine. i have servers at home with years of uptime without any ECC memory
  - conception 8mo ago
    But how much bit rot? You’ll never know.
    - Maxion 8mo ago
      If I don't know about it, then how does it affect me / why should I care? My home server does what it is supposed to do and has done so for a decade. If bit rot /bit flips in memory does not affect my day-to-day life I much prefer cheaper hardware. I do hope the nuclear powerplant next door uses more fault tolerant hardware, though.
      - loeg 8mo ago
        Eventually you might notice the pictures or other documents you were saving on your home server have artifacts, or no longer open. This is undesireable for most people using computer storage. > I much prefer cheaper hardware. The cost savings are modest; order of magnitude 12% for the DIMMs, and less elsewhere. Computers are already extremely cheap commodities.
        zadikian 8mo ago
        12% for the DIMMs only, but with Intel you need Xeon and its accompanying motherboard for it. Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered. Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost, yeah I would pay 12% more for ECC. But I'm with the other guy on not valuing it a ton. I have backups which are needed regardless of bitrot, and even if those don't help, losing a photo isn't a huge deal for me.
        loeg 8mo ago
        > Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered. That was me. It isn't "officially" supported by AMD, but it should work. You can enable EDAC monitoring in Linux and observe detected correction events happening. > Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost That's the argument, yeah.
    - zadikian 8mo ago
      I'm more concerned how the Mac filesystems don't have payload checksums.
- throwaway85825 8mo ago
  Very few applications scale with cores. For the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper. They don't need or want workstation gear.
  - rafaelmn 8mo ago
    > Very few applications scale with cores You mean like compilers and test suites ? Very few professional workloads don't parallelize well these days.
    - VorpalWay 8mo ago
      Compilers and test suits do scale (at least for C/C++ and Rust, which is what I work with). But I think the parent comment referred to consumer applications: games, word processing, light browsing, ... (Though games these days scale better than they used to, but only up to a to a point.) I find that most tools I write for my own use can be made to scale with cores, or run so fast that the overhead of starting threads is longer than the program runtime. But I write that in Rust which makes parallelism easy. If I wrote that code in C++ I would probably not bother with trying to parallelize.
      - rafaelmn 8mo ago
        But those tools aren't really compute bound anyway - you're not buying a workstation to do them, you're getting a consumer laptop or a tablet.
        loeg 8mo ago
        And that consumer device should have ECC! That's the whole discussion here.
        zadikian 8mo ago
        It's confusing because a few comments up is "for the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper" which is unrelated to ECC.
- zadikian 8mo ago
  There were several years where used cheese grater Mac Pros could be bought and upgraded for very cheap, and were still not too outdated. I only replaced my MacPro4,1 when the M1 mini came out, mainly cause of wattage.
- deepsun 8mo ago
  I hate my workstation desktop I assembled 15 years. It just doesn't break! I have no excuses to buy a new one (except for video card).
altairprime 8mo ago
288-pin ECC is, I believe, available on any X670E/X870E platform boards so long as the motherboard builder hasn’t expressly interfered with it (and probably other chipsets as well?). Windows 10+ reports it as full ECC (multi-bit / 72-bits). AMD pushed that enable in an AGESA three or four years ago iirc. The CAS latency for ECC is about double what gaming RAM offers, but in practice other more costly factors tend to limit performance first. Any motherboard released before the AGESA update would be more difficult to predict, but that’s baseline uncertainty for PCs so no surprises there.
- antonkochubey 8mo ago
  >The CAS latency for ECC is about double what gaming RAM offers Ironically, overclocking ECC memory is much easier than overclocking non-ECC DIMMs, because you know exactly at which point you start encountering instability and need to dial back, instead of relying on.. application crashes and BSOD's to know that you're running way too optimistic clocks/timings. Meanwhile I overclocked 'low clock / loose timing' ECC DIMMs on Ryzen 7 platform with no issues at all – kept increasing clocks and lowering timings until ECC started reporting errors, then dialed it back a couple notches, and now it is not just stable, but I also have exact reporting of it being stable.
  - cromka 8mo ago
    Same experience here. I have a feeling ECC in gaming would soon become a thing if it wasn't for the pricing crisis.
  - altairprime 8mo ago
    Yeah! A stick of 5600 can generally reach 6000 with geardown off and that’s as far as I’ve seen cause to dial it. But certain parameters that are popular to lower for latency reduction can be, how would I put it, slightly less flexible — tREFI comes to mind as one that nearly any lowering of (on the enterprise sticks I’m using anyways) tends to cause DFE/MBIST training failures no matter what, even with direct airflow, before it ever boots far enough for memtest to expose ECC errors. (For those out there following along with PCs, if you aren’t tuning with MBIST maxed out in your BIOS, you might want to revisit that.)

by loeg 8mo ago

rpcope1 8mo ago

I've been honestly amazed people actually buy stuff that's not "workstation" gear given IME how much more reliably and consistently it works, but I guess even a generation or two used can be expensive.

loeg 8mo ago
I've had zero issues with AMD's consumer tier of non-WX Threadripper and Ryzen models, FWIW.
thousand_nights 8mo ago
overblown? billions of users use consumer tier hardware just fine. i have servers at home with years of uptime without any ECC memory
- conception 8mo ago
  But how much bit rot? You’ll never know.
  - Maxion 8mo ago
    If I don't know about it, then how does it affect me / why should I care? My home server does what it is supposed to do and has done so for a decade. If bit rot /bit flips in memory does not affect my day-to-day life I much prefer cheaper hardware. I do hope the nuclear powerplant next door uses more fault tolerant hardware, though.
    - loeg 8mo ago
      Eventually you might notice the pictures or other documents you were saving on your home server have artifacts, or no longer open. This is undesireable for most people using computer storage. > I much prefer cheaper hardware. The cost savings are modest; order of magnitude 12% for the DIMMs, and less elsewhere. Computers are already extremely cheap commodities.
      - zadikian 8mo ago
        12% for the DIMMs only, but with Intel you need Xeon and its accompanying motherboard for it. Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered. Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost, yeah I would pay 12% more for ECC. But I'm with the other guy on not valuing it a ton. I have backups which are needed regardless of bitrot, and even if those don't help, losing a photo isn't a huge deal for me.
        loeg 8mo ago
        > Someone said AMD "kinda" lets you do ECC on consumer hardware, not sure what the caveats are besides just being unbuffered. That was me. It isn't "officially" supported by AMD, but it should work. You can enable EDAC monitoring in Linux and observe detected correction events happening. > Assuming that's more due to intentional market segmentation than actual cost That's the argument, yeah.
  - zadikian 8mo ago
    I'm more concerned how the Mac filesystems don't have payload checksums.
throwaway85825 8mo ago
Very few applications scale with cores. For the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper. They don't need or want workstation gear.
- rafaelmn 8mo ago
  > Very few applications scale with cores You mean like compilers and test suites ? Very few professional workloads don't parallelize well these days.
  - VorpalWay 8mo ago
    Compilers and test suits do scale (at least for C/C++ and Rust, which is what I work with). But I think the parent comment referred to consumer applications: games, word processing, light browsing, ... (Though games these days scale better than they used to, but only up to a to a point.) I find that most tools I write for my own use can be made to scale with cores, or run so fast that the overhead of starting threads is longer than the program runtime. But I write that in Rust which makes parallelism easy. If I wrote that code in C++ I would probably not bother with trying to parallelize.
    - rafaelmn 8mo ago
      But those tools aren't really compute bound anyway - you're not buying a workstation to do them, you're getting a consumer laptop or a tablet.
      - loeg 8mo ago
        And that consumer device should have ECC! That's the whole discussion here.
        zadikian 8mo ago
        It's confusing because a few comments up is "for the vast majority of people single core performance is all they care about, it's also cheaper" which is unrelated to ECC.
zadikian 8mo ago
There were several years where used cheese grater Mac Pros could be bought and upgraded for very cheap, and were still not too outdated. I only replaced my MacPro4,1 when the M1 mini came out, mainly cause of wattage.
deepsun 8mo ago
I hate my workstation desktop I assembled 15 years. It just doesn't break! I have no excuses to buy a new one (except for video card).

altairprime 8mo ago

288-pin ECC is, I believe, available on any X670E/X870E platform boards so long as the motherboard builder hasn’t expressly interfered with it (and probably other chipsets as well?). Windows 10+ reports it as full ECC (multi-bit / 72-bits). AMD pushed that enable in an AGESA three or four years ago iirc. The CAS latency for ECC is about double what gaming RAM offers, but in practice other more costly factors tend to limit performance first. Any motherboard released before the AGESA update would be more difficult to predict, but that’s baseline uncertainty for PCs so no surprises there.

antonkochubey 8mo ago
>The CAS latency for ECC is about double what gaming RAM offers Ironically, overclocking ECC memory is much easier than overclocking non-ECC DIMMs, because you know exactly at which point you start encountering instability and need to dial back, instead of relying on.. application crashes and BSOD's to know that you're running way too optimistic clocks/timings. Meanwhile I overclocked 'low clock / loose timing' ECC DIMMs on Ryzen 7 platform with no issues at all – kept increasing clocks and lowering timings until ECC started reporting errors, then dialed it back a couple notches, and now it is not just stable, but I also have exact reporting of it being stable.
- cromka 8mo ago
  Same experience here. I have a feeling ECC in gaming would soon become a thing if it wasn't for the pricing crisis.
- altairprime 8mo ago
  Yeah! A stick of 5600 can generally reach 6000 with geardown off and that’s as far as I’ve seen cause to dial it. But certain parameters that are popular to lower for latency reduction can be, how would I put it, slightly less flexible — tREFI comes to mind as one that nearly any lowering of (on the enterprise sticks I’m using anyways) tends to cause DFE/MBIST training failures no matter what, even with direct airflow, before it ever boots far enough for memtest to expose ECC errors. (For those out there following along with PCs, if you aren’t tuning with MBIST maxed out in your BIOS, you might want to revisit that.)