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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

How about some consumer desktop ones with ECC RAM support?

Never gonna happen. ECC is "pro" feature for Intel, reserved for Xeons only. They have to justify high price of Xeons somehow.

Even AMD think of it as such. Ryzen doesn't have it disabled on the desktop, but AMD haven't validated it either.

Didn't AMD employees confirm it a few times on the web already ?

ECC is working with AMD if the motherboard supports it, but you can't always be sure that the motherboard does support it correctly. You need to rely on user reports/what the motherboard producer promises, instead of it being a default feature that always works.

Still a lot more than what Intel offers in that space.

Thanks

I didn't say ECC doesn't work. It is enabled on Ryzen. But it's not something AMD go to the effort of validating to make sure it works properly and it doesn't get support. It's left in there as a footnote for enthusiasts.

If I'm not mistaken there are a few Pentiums and i3 chips that support ECC. For example the G4560.

You mean server chips. The server Atoms also support ECC. For eg. https://ark.intel.com/products/97927/Intel-Atom-Processor-C3...

What's the price difference between consumer (no ECC) and workstation (ECC support) (mobo+cpu+memory)?

Xeon E3-1230 varies by generation (v1 to v6 or so), but is typically slightly cheaper or slightly lower clocked then the top of the line i7.

The motherboards are about another $50, and the dimms are another 25% or so more than non-ecc dimms.

Why is ECC sought after on the desktop?

Some people run >32GB RAM with long uptime and there the chance of a random bit-flip might not be acceptable. Imagine working on some Deep Learning model, training it for 30 consecutive days and then hitting a memory bug during computation.

Not your everyday requirement, also ML is somewhat tolerant to small faults like that.

Depends. If a bit is flipped in a dataset you are likely fine, if in code your computation might crash. If you use enterprise-grade software like ZFS filesystem that keeps a lot in memory, it's much better to have ECC and accept a bit slower memory access for a bit better protection.

ZFS without ECC is pretty useless ...

ZFS is no more vulnerable to corruption when running without ECC than any other file system.

The developers of zfs suggest ECC because ECC is a worthwhile thing for those who care about their data.

You should stop spreading misinformation.

Rowhammer protection, for one thing.

ECC does not protect against Rowhammer attacks.

It seems you are correct, but surely it must make a practical attack much harder?

I'm not so sure. But it's not an area I know much about. But practically thinking: If you try to change the memory content of an area, that means you have software running on the target machine. Does it matter much then whether you need more time because of ECC?

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