ECC should be a standard feature. If you don't want it you don't have to use it but to disable simply for market segmentation is lame.
Might as well ask her about the possibility of coreboot if we are at it.
Edit: Account made, instructions received. If all goes well I should be asking later today.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
btw: someone asked about coreboot: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
Has Asrock explicitly stated that it works with all CPUs, or just that all their boards can do it (IF the CPU also supports it)?
> AMD Ryzen series CPUs support DDR4 2667/2400/2133 ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory
So the board seems to accept ECC memory, hopefully that means the memory controller actually performs ECC? I found a reddit comment claiming that the boards accept ECC memory but don't perform error correction[1]. Not a great source but seemingly possible.
Do you have any more sources suggesting that ECC is actually being implemented?
For example, BIOSs often have ECC settings, if we had some screenshots of an AM4 board bios showing ECC setting that would be strong evidence.
[0] http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370%20Killer%20SLIac/index.asp...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5v0cqo/ryzen_supports_...
In that case anandtech saying "We know that it is disabled for the consumer parts" and ASRock saying "ASRock AM4 motherboards fully support ECC function" can both be true.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
This is set up by the firmware (BIOS). Since we all already know that quite some of these still have issues (unsurprisingly, it's a new platform), it isn't far-fetched at all that current firmware doesn't quite do the right thing with certain memory sticks.
Note that this is unbuffered, unregistered ECC memory, which is usually more expensive and less available than the standard server memory (DDR3R / DDR4R), which is NOT compatible with any consumer CPUs.
Right now the #3 system in the world is a Cray system using Opterons.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wO1MKok...
Edit: If no motherboard supports its, in Linux one can use ecc_enable_override (similar thing might be available in Windows). That is if the CPU support it. It can USE ECC memory, but we don't know if it can use the ECC checksums, most motherboards have a NO here.
I agree ECC should be a standard feature, but it follows the same marketing patterns (in that industry) as disabling multi-processor support or artificially limiting clock speeds.
Without ECC you may get a completely wrong answer when the increasingly small, vulnerable, and numerous dram cell is flipped.
I don't like this situation, but I certainly understand it. AMD needs the server market to raise revenues. This means its server offerings, from soup to nuts, need to be rock solid. Letting whitebox resellers junk up their reputation is not within their interests.
Not to mention, enterprise sales often subsidize consumer sales. Those big enterprise markups go into the same pot of money that allows AMD to sell consumer chips at lower prices. Anything that threatens enterprise sales could affect the consumer space. AMD needs to be very careful here as, compared to intel, it needs to prove the value of its brand every chip generation. They also need to overcome a lot of bad mojo they've developed from questionable benchmarking and marketing of its previous two, or more, generations of chips. Bulldozer, I believe, had half the single core performance compared to the intel equivalant at the time, yet it benchmarked well due to its extra cores. The market doesn't forget shenanigans like these.
That said, the market allows 'workstation' level cpus and motherboards that support ECC. A little legwork can find you decent deals, but no, they're not going to be $59 NewEgg specials and you won't be able to use the consumer Ryzen on it. Consumer CPUs are almost always gimped anyway - smaller caches, disabled features, slower clocks, etc. The ECC limitation isn't too different from this, but it is annoying.