Personal computing discussed
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just brew it! wrote:ASRock seems to be the only AM4 motherboard vendor (so far) that doesn't have the "operates in non-ECC mode" disclaimer in their specs regarding use of ECC DIMMs. Has anyone actually tried it, and verified that the ECC capability of the DIMMs is recognized by the system? I downloaded the manuals for a couple of their AM4 boards and there's no mention of ECC settings in the UEFI, which makes me a little suspicious. Yes, it could be just automatically detecting (and enabling) ECC, but most BIOSes/UEFIs on ECC-capable boards have an explicit enable/disable setting for it.
whm1974 wrote:It really that hard for motherboard manufacturers to clearly state what features are support by their products? And how to enable them?
just brew it! wrote:whm1974 wrote:It really that hard for motherboard manufacturers to clearly state what features are support by their products? And how to enable them?
In this case, apparently so.
AMD added to the confusion by not clearly stating ahead of time whether the initial round of Ryzen CPUs would support it, then (when questioned about it specifically) stating that the feature is present on the Ryzen die but "not validated".
whm1974 wrote:Just another beef with hardware manufacturers I have. Yes I know fully well that no one is perfect and AMD has very big hill to climb, but shouldn't a very important feature be supported at launch?
just brew it! wrote:whm1974 wrote:Just another beef with hardware manufacturers I have. Yes I know fully well that no one is perfect and AMD has very big hill to climb, but shouldn't a very important feature be supported at launch?
It is only "very important" to people who want to use AM4/Ryzen as a way to build high-reliability server/NAS boxes without shelling out for an Intel server platform. These people represent a small segment of the market, and are therefore not "very important" to the makers of enthusiast/gamer-oriented motherboards. For AMD, it is arguably counter-productive to officially support ECC on the "enthusiast" parts, since that could potentially cut into the sales of the (presumably higher-margin) upcoming Naples variant for servers.
At the end of the day, the motherboard vendors and AMD are in this to make money, not to make everyone happy by including every feature anyone might want. They're going to focus on where they think they can make the most profit.
just brew it! wrote:Previous generations of AMD CPU's and motherboards supported ECC and gamers sneered because Intel's use of non ECC DDR in the consumer market made their memory faster. I'll be surprised if any board can support ECC at the highest DDR speeds.whm1974 wrote:Just another beef with hardware manufacturers I have. Yes I know fully well that no one is perfect and AMD has very big hill to climb, but shouldn't a very important feature be supported at launch?
It is only "very important" to people who want to use AM4/Ryzen as a way to build high-reliability server/NAS boxes without shelling out for an Intel server platform. These people represent a small segment of the market, and are therefore not "very important" to the makers of enthusiast/gamer-oriented motherboards. For AMD, it is arguably counter-productive to officially support ECC on the "enthusiast" parts, since that could potentially cut into the sales of the (presumably higher-margin) upcoming Naples variant for servers.
At the end of the day, the motherboard vendors and AMD are in this to make money, not to make everyone happy by including every feature anyone might want. They're going to focus on where they think they can make the most profit.
whm1974 wrote:It really that hard for motherboard manufacturers to clearly state what features are support by their products? And how to enable them?
just brew it! wrote:Looks like it has been confirmed that the ASRock X370 Taichi supports it: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/ha ... -dive.html
Vhalidictes wrote:whm1974 wrote:It really that hard for motherboard manufacturers to clearly state what features are support by their products? And how to enable them?
The part I don't understand is how it's even possible for ECC not to work in the first place; The controller is on the CPU!
chuckula wrote:just brew it! wrote:Looks like it has been confirmed that the ASRock X370 Taichi supports it: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/ha ... -dive.html
Interesting. So the good news was that with the right tweaking they were able to ensure that the ECC memory was actually running in ECC mode.
But it's still not quite there because with an uncorrectable error the system kept on chugging instead of halting. Hopefully they can fix that in the firmware.
just brew it! wrote:chuckula wrote:just brew it! wrote:Looks like it has been confirmed that the ASRock X370 Taichi supports it: http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/ha ... -dive.html
Interesting. So the good news was that with the right tweaking they were able to ensure that the ECC memory was actually running in ECC mode.
But it's still not quite there because with an uncorrectable error the system kept on chugging instead of halting. Hopefully they can fix that in the firmware.
Seems like that should be the OS's responsibility. The OS knew the UCE occurred, since it logged it. OS should trigger a kernel panic / BSOD when it detects an uncorrectable error.
chuckula wrote:just brew it! wrote:chuckula wrote:Interesting. So the good news was that with the right tweaking they were able to ensure that the ECC memory was actually running in ECC mode.
But it's still not quite there because with an uncorrectable error the system kept on chugging instead of halting. Hopefully they can fix that in the firmware.
Seems like that should be the OS's responsibility. The OS knew the UCE occurred, since it logged it. OS should trigger a kernel panic / BSOD when it detects an uncorrectable error.
Apparently it's a configurable option: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... Vgso6u2GP0
If the system was running the default (and maybe it wasn't) then it's a somewhat vague "always panic OR SIGBUS". That means maybe if the memory error occurred in a normal user-level program that some program on their test machine bailed out with a SIGBUS error but the overall system kept running. If the same memory error had occurred during a kernel-space operation then (presumably) the system would have crashed with a panic.
just brew it! wrote:Vhalidictes wrote:whm1974 wrote:It really that hard for motherboard manufacturers to clearly state what features are support by their products? And how to enable them?
The part I don't understand is how it's even possible for ECC not to work in the first place; The controller is on the CPU!
The memory buses need to be 72 bits wide instead of 64, to support the ECC bits. If the motherboard designer doesn't provide the extra PCB traces between the CPU socket and DIMM slots, ECC won't work even if the memory controller and DIMMs support it.