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Comment by octoploid | Hacker News Reader

Anandtech is wrong and ECC is not disabled at all. For example all ASRock AM4 boards support ECC memory.

Thanks for pointing this out. I found this on the specification page[0] for the ASRock "X370 Killer SLI/ac" AM4 board:

> 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_...

Several people contacted ASRock in the last few days. And the reply always was that ECC is fully supported, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13762950

That's good information but still doesn't tell us that these cpus support ECC, right? Maybe the motherboard fully supports ECC when used with a future 1800X-PRO but not with the 3 chips reviewed here.

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.

AMD will use the same die for its server CPUs, so ECC support is on chip anyway. I see no reason why they should turn it off in the Ryzen CPUs launched today.

It looks like you are (thankfully!) right. The CEO of AMD confirmed ECC is enabled on the consumer chips. This is an awesome release overall!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...

The IMC in almost any Intel CPU also could do ECC, but on most consumer SKUs there's that pesky little configuration flag set by the factory telling it not to. Why? Because Intel can, that's why.

Gigabyte mobos say you can use ecc memory but not run them in ecc mode. "Support for ECC Un-buffered DIMM 1Rx8/2Rx8 memory modules (operate in non-ECC mode)"

> 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].

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5vsz90/ryzen_does_not_... De-comfirmed unless the source is lying.

FWIW, I remember ASRock being mistaken about AMD features in the past: iirc there was a while when they were wrongly asserting that Bulldozer didn't support I/O virtualisation. (Eventually they implemented it on their own AM3 motherboards.)

IIRC just because it boots with ECC ram doesn't mean it is actually error correcting. I'm under the impression Intel spends considerable amount of money to prove their memory controllers actually error correct & historically AMD hasn't spent the money on documenting theirs.

Back when high-end supercomputers used AMD Opterons, systems with a lot of memory would have had observable problems had ECC not worked pretty well.

Right now the #3 system in the world is a Cray system using Opterons.

ECC is not complex to implement.

Source?

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)?

Is that buffered ECC or unbuffured ECC? Because last time I checked, my AM3 board had support only for unbuffured, which is really hard to find and I just didn't bother.

unbuffured Example: http://www.asrock.com/MB/AMD/X370%20Killer%20SLI/index.asp#S...

I don't know why you're being downvoted, your comment is accurate. Consumer hardware traditionally does not support registered memory, which is (reg ECC) the standard for server hardware hence cheap, while unbuf, unreg ECC is rather rare. AM4/Zen is no exception, no DDR4R for consumers.

Not that expensive or rare: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682024...

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