7th) Will all Zen products have all of the instruction sets and platform extensions, or could lower end chips lose features like virtualization?
A7: In the consumer client space we have no plans to turn off virtualization or features.
9th) Does AM4 / consumer ZEN support ECC memory?
A9: ECC is enabled on Ryzen and AM4.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...]
edit: added link
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
Ultimately the memory clock speed doesn't affect performance very much, so I'm not sure it matters.
From what I've been reading about the upcoming Ryzen, no motherboard so far claims to support ECC.
However, I expect that there will eventually be some workstation grade motherboards from vendors like Supermicro which will be more direct about guaranteeing ECC support. This will be especially true if AMD decides to release some “official” small server grade CPUs on the AM4 socket (kind of like Intel’s Xeon E3 which uses the regular consumer socket, but requires a different chipset). I don’t know if there are any plans for such a CPU from AMD, but it wouldn’t surprise me considering there’s probably some real demand for something a little less expensive and powerful than the 32C/64T Naples server CPU. Rebranding a consumer 8C/16T Ryzen seems like a logical step, with the only cost being validation.
The thing to remember is that supporting ECC on an AM4 motherboard basically amounts to running a few extra traces between the CPU and DRAM slots, and adding support in the BIOS to initialize the memory controller properly. My experiencing in implementing boot code to initialize memory controllers leads me to believe that it’s probably one or two days worth of work to actually get it working (once everything else is done).
The real cost comes from testing and validation, which is why some manufacturers are so hesitant to give a straight answer regarding ECC support on consumer platforms. There is no point in spending the money to validate a feature that the majority of their customers think is a complete waste.
By offering “working but not validated” ECC support, they’re able to satisfy the demand of those who want to use these chips for small non critical servers without undercutting their higher margin server grade components.
Link on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
Don't get me wrong, I have a bunch of rack pull servers and they're great for the price but I colo mine for less/server than the power bill/server would be at home and have them ona faster connection. I stick with low power options for light in-home usage
Modern processors do some clever tricks to minimize using power if it is not needed, and have gotten progressively better at it. For home use cases, it's often worthwile to spend more money to get newer or otherwise more efficient PC components. This is especially true in areas where electricity costs are higher (e.g. average price per KWh can be almost twice as high in the Benelux when compared to the US).
One thing to get an indication about how good a CPU/chipset is is idle power usage of a system. It seems Ryzen is even better at this than Intel's already excellent Sky/Kaby Lake architectures [1], possibly because of the fact that Ryzen motherboards contain fewer components. On the contrary, the Ivy Bridge architecture of the chip mentioned by the parent cannot be considered competitive from a power consumption perspective, despite still being a great performer.
[1]: https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R...
While there is reason to think soft errors are much less common than often claimed and therefore ECC memory has been much less necessary than people think (at least within the atmosphere), there's now a pretty good reason to prefer ECC memory because of rowhammer.
PS: Radiation also makes a huge difference.
Anyway as a former memory subsystem designer and a former employee of a memory chip maker, I like ECC. It provides some protection against bus noise errors even if you have full confidence in the memory chips themselves.
Personal anecdote: Upgraded RAM in my PC, ran memtest, everything fine. A year later, I need to move and so I consolidate all my data on a big hard disk. As the disk is new, I run some verification and notice some non-matching checksums. Long story short, the new RAM had become defective, and a new memtest showed a handful of errors after a few hours. Had I had ECC on that machine, I probably would have seen notifications about memory errors even before that day (plus the errors would likely have been corrected).
If Ryzen allows us to build a powerful PC with ECC for little more money than a non-ECC one, I'll happily pay for this "feel good feature". The current ECC-capable alternative from the Intel universe (Xeon CPU & motherboard) is simply too expensive for most people.
Definitely this. The extra safety of mind offered by ECC RAM is totally worth the tiny price difference for me. The only thing that stopped me from actually using it was the lack of (affordable) CPU support. Ryzen changes that.
On that note, I hope it's not long until we can easily buy ultraportable laptops with ECC RAM without paying through the nose for Intel's ridiculous prices for their mobile Xeon CPUs.
It's not a silver bullet if the user is just paranoid about data integrity (nothing beats end-to-end integrity checks built into your system, while ECC only addresses one step in the process).
In any case I LOVE ECC. Sure random radiation caused bit flips are relatively rare. But it's REALLY nice to see high levels of ECC errors when something died and not have to wonder if it's the flash drive, power supply, graphics card etc. Sure sometimes its the dimm, sometimes it's the motherboard, sometimes it's the CPU. But with ECC errors you can much more quickly/easily tell if it changes when you swap things around.