Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulmd | Hacker News Reader

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> You don't have to wait. The current Ryzen 3000 series processors support ECC.

The post you were responding to asked when they would get official ECC support. ECC is not officially supported on Ryzen. If it works on your particular board/BIOS, great, but it's not officially validated or tested, so nobody besides you will actually be testing whether it works, and if it doesn't work in some edge case (or at all) then sucks to be you. If ECC doesn't work right on some future BIOS revision that fixes a security issue or some other critical bug, and there is never an updated version that does support ECC, sucks to be you.

That is specifically the problem that people are looking to avoid by asking for official support.

As it stands, you can probably count the number of boards that anyone would bother to validate ECC on on a single hand - Asrock Rack has two server boards, Asus has some "WS" series that might, maybe some of the high-end Asrock consumer boards. And it will never be officially supported by AMD, if there is a critical bug then welp.

As such I think "ECC is supported on AM4" is a bit of an exaggeration or a clever bit of terminology spin from some fans. If you call up AMD and ask, they will tell you they don't go out of their way to disable it (except in APUs) but it's not supported. I think "functional" or "enabled" is a better term.

(Intel validates support on their consumer processors, by the way... i3s and Pentiums officially support ECC. Supermicro/Asrock Rack/etc test those configurations and if they don't work then you can complain and they will fix them.)

> The post you were responding to asked when they would get official ECC support. ECC is not officially supported on Ryzen. If it works on your particular board/BIOS, great, but it's not officially validated or tested, so nobody besides you will actually be testing whether it works, and if it doesn't work in some edge case (or at all) then sucks to be you. If ECC doesn't work right on some future BIOS revision that fixes a security issue or some other critical bug, and there is never an updated version that does support ECC, sucks to be you.

ECC is officially supported on Ryzen CPUs. The feature is present in the chip, and you can RMA it if it doesn't work.

ECC support is not _validated_ on the AM4 platform. That means that a motherboard vendor can market a motherboard that lacks ECC support as being AM4-compatible, and not get a nasty letter from AMD's lawyers. By extension, it also means that ECC support becomes a feature of the motherboard, rather than something you can take for granted that the entire AM4 platform supports.

From the user perspective, it does mean that if you're looking to buy a Ryzen-based platform with ECC support, you need to check to see if the motherboard supports ECC. But once you've made that selection, you will have a fully-functional ECC-capable platform with full support.

> As it stands, you can probably count the number of boards that anyone would bother to validate ECC on on a single hand - Asrock Rack has two server boards, Asus has some "WS" series that might, maybe some of the high-end Asrock consumer boards. And it will never be officially supported by AMD, if there is a critical bug then welp.

All ASRock AM4 boards (that I'm aware of) support ECC, and most ASUS boards do. I can't speak for other brands, but ECC is pretty broadly supported (the motherboard manual will say whether it's supported it or not).

What separates the motherboards you mentioned is that ECC support is _marketed_ as being a feature.

As a data point, I'm currently running an ASRock B450M Pro4 motherboard with a Ryzen 9 3900X and 64 GB of Kingston KSM26ED8/16ME DDR4-2666 ECC DRAM, and it is working with full ECC support.

> ECC is not officially supported on Ryzen. If it works on your particular board/BIOS, great, but it's not officially validated or tested

The Asus Pro X570 ACE (or similar name) explicitly offers ECC support though, not just unofficially.

Some boards list in the specs, but that's not a guarantee that it's actually working. Previous BIOS revisions can and have silently broken the ECC part of the memory functionality, and nobody at the board companies was testing it so it went out without anybody noticing until a user started a forum thread about it. That was Asrock iirc.

In the case of MSI, those boards reportedly also don't support the ECC reporting function. They will try to correct them but they don't actually report them to the OS. MSI's answer: "wow, sucks to be you". AMD’s answer: “wow, sucks to be you”. That's what you get from "unofficial support", just a halfhearted level of effort all around.

https://hardwarecanucks.com/forum/threads/ecc-memory-amds-ry...

(there are really multiple levels of functionality here, "boots with ECC in non-ECC mode", "corrects ECC silently", and "behaves like a server and reports ECC to the OS or lets you reboot the system". You'll note that nobody ever commits to a particular level of support on AM4 based products...)

Furthermore, AMD doesn't support it at a processor level, so they apply no pressure to the mobo companies to actually test the features they claim they support, nor will they fix it if there is ever a critical functionality bug. An AGESA update could break or remove ECC and welp, sucks to be you, they never advertised that as an actual feature.

That is why I think it is a little ridiculous that people phrase that as "supported". Nobody is validating that it actually works, nobody at AMD will stand behind the feature, and will in fact tell you that they don't support it.

It works, probably, on certain combinations of hardware and BIOS. It is not supported by anyone other than yourself and your own time.

> Some boards list in the specs, but that's not a guarantee that it's actually working.

You do realize that false advertising is illegal? Of course realistically that would be a very uphill battle to pursue but that doesn't make it legal.

For example my motherboard has built in audio. The board manufacturer makes some fairly vague claims about what precisely that means but it is clear that there are ports on the board and that they will provide some base level of functionality in conjunction with a supported OS. To the best of my knowledge the CPU manufacturer makes absolutely no claims about that feature. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to expect it to work.

Of course it would be nice if AMD required ECC support as part of the platform. Then all the boards would be required to support it and I wouldn't have to bother reading their spec sheets.

> there are really multiple levels of functionality here

This is the real issue. At least historically, some boards "supported" ECC memory to the extent that they could operate with it inserted; they didn't actually do any error correcting though. Of course in the case I'm aware of (MSI) they specifically stated that. If you as a consumer glossed over their claims and missed that, legally that was on you.

Other vendors specifically stated that their boards officially supported actual ECC functionality. It's not safe to assume precisely what that means though (silent vs reported) unless the manufacturer makes an official claim.

I don't know about AM4 but my TR4 MSI board definitely does report ECC errors (both corrected and uncorrectable).

thanks for the informative reply,

> i3s and Pentiums officially support ECC

my experience is that OEMs like Dell won't support ECC except for Xeon configurations. You can get the same machine with an i9 but not ECC memory or the Xeon and ECC.

> You can get the same machine with an i9 but not ECC memory or the Xeon and ECC.

The desktop and workstation class Xeons are in direct competition with i9 processors in terms of raw performance, which is why Intel uses features like ECC to enforce product segmentation. This isn't the case for the low-end i3 and Pentium branded processors, because the Xeon lineup simply doesn't extend down that far. If you want to build eg. an industrial PC with ECC memory but you only need a low-end CPU, Intel's official solution is for you to get an i3 or Pentium processor because they don't have anything equivalent under the Xeon branding.

i9 and Xeon (officially) use a different PCH. So it's not really the same machine.

Explaining in opposite: Pentium supports both PCH lines and supports ECC because they don't want to sell such cheap Xeon-branded CPU.

Well, that's a different segment, you won't find Dell selling you a 3900X and ECC in a server or workstation either.

But OEMs like SuperMicro and Asrock Rack do officially support this, and sell barebones or pre-configured systems like this.

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/X11SCH-LN...

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/1U/5019/SYS-50...

Workstation: https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=C...

(and to be fair, Asrock Rack does have a few AM4 server boards and barebones, and these are among the few I would count on to actually validate ECC. It really just is something you have to explicitly go out of you way to find support for in the AMD ecosystem, whereas it's "free" on any C2xx server board in the Intel ecosystem, the default assumption is that it works because it's considered a supported configuration and that's not the case with AMD.)

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=X...

https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=1...

Dell does actually sell Pentium machines with ECC support, like the smaller Poweredge servers such as T140. They've done this for a while, I personally run T20 with ECC and G3220 (sold like this by Dell).

They do occasionally remove some features like IPMI from those cheaper processor options, but the ECC support stays.

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