Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zenst | Hacker News Reader

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I hope Intel will at least offer ECC memory for their consumer CPU's now. For now at least AMD are offering the option and will only increase uptake, increasing supply/demand and drive prices down.

I hope that in a few years time that ECC will become standard, as for many it is driving a car without a seatbelt.

This and with security exploits (rowhammer), ECC would be the solution that is a price gap that for many, is still one that can and should be closed.

That all said, it would only take the one or two big mobile manufacturers to go ECC and marketing virtu the whole security and integrity aspect for the rest of the market to follow suit. Which would be a bigger driver in reducing the price gap premium over non-ecc memory. Which is how I see things panning out as mobile phone makers are running out of sell features to add and this would be an easy one for the premium market of phones out there today. Also one in which would go down very well for that feature alone.

> I hope Intel will at least offer ECC memory for their consumer CPU's now.

They do (or did?). My home NAS is running a Sandy Bridge Intel Celeron with ECC memory. Support seems to be randomly distributed thought through the product line[1] though and obviously depends on the motherboard manufacturer to implement it as well.

In general, Intel has a problem with branding. Their product lines are confusing mess requiring looking up each specific part to get a list of features it does or does not support. There's little rhyme or reason to it.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=22587440

> Their product lines are confusing mess requiring looking up each specific part to get a list of features it does or does not support. There's little rhyme or reason to it.

I got bitten by that back in the Core 2 era. When I built my very last Intel system, around an Intel DG43NB board, I picked up a Q8200, thinking it would be a great bang-for-the-buck chip. Little did I realize from the store display that the Q8200 was the only Core 2 Quad that lacked virtualization support.

The DG43NB died prematurely, due to capacitor plague. I didn't shed any tears for it.

Since Haswell, ECC support has been on (Core-based desktop) Celerons, Pentiums, i3s, and Xeons. It's quite straightforward, when they pulled 2C Xeons off the market they added it to the consumer processors instead, but they still want to retain Xeon sales for the higher-end products so they lock it off on the i5s/i7s/i9s.

Of course you need to know what you're looking at, the suffix of the number matters a lot (eg 7100 vs 7100U), but that is nothing Intel-specific. A Ryzen 2700 and a Ryzen 2700U are very different processors as well.

The issue isn't that somehow the 7100U vs 7100 is some fundamental design decision that didn't include ECC support, its that Intel had a chip where ECC was supported, then disabled it.

Its not because they are "very different processors".

The 7100U is a BGA laptop processor. You're not in danger of accidentally buying a 7100U to put into your NAS.

If you look at the products that are actually compatible with your system, it's not confusing at all. Pentium/Celeron/i3/Xeon = has ECC, i5/i7 = no ECC.

So whats the advantage to ECC and why would you choose to go with ECC over more, faster memory, cheaper? I've seen ECC touted in much marketing, but the usecases to me seem, well boutique, such as video or computer graphics rendering.

I'm running 64 GB ECC with a Ryzen system. As it turns out, memory in general was just exorbitantly expensive in the recent past, so the ECC premium wasn't all that much. On the flip side, I don't do PC gaming so having faster memory didn't really matter much; current ECC was already faster than the 5 year old system I was upgrading from.

For me, the reason to go ECC was just to prevent silent file corruption. With 64 GB, the math is in favor of me seeing bit flips. Moreover, I tend to put my machine to sleep, rather than shut it off, which also increases the likelihood of memory errors. I wouldn't say I have a highly specialized workload outside of the occasional VM, consisting of large files, for development. A lot of it is I just didn't want to deal with silent corruption of family photos & videos, even if the underlying file formats are pretty resilient.

Personally, I think the situation should be flipped. Everyone should run with ECC these days and only run without for specialized environments like gaming where you want to squeeze out every FPS you can. Faster memory isn't going to matter for most situations.

Protection against memory errors, I don't have exact odds of such errors, but certainly not negligible and with faster memory and capacities - those odds only increase. Many such errors will go unnoticed and the impact for most will be unknown, but can equally be very impacting. Hence today it is only critical systems that have such use, as can justify the extra cost.

But for everything else, it's a scale of needs, sure the low-end would be a gaming console or graphics memory, but if that gap gets smaller, uptake and usage will scale as that advantage becomes cost effective at various consumer levels.

But having the option of choice, is and always been a huge plus for any consumer - AMD makes that choice far more accessible than Intel. Though I do see a mobile phone maker going ECC as the turning point in uptake and making that price gap more palatable in the end.

If you value stability and no file corruption, you'll go for ECC.

If you use it just for media consumption and playing games, anything goes.

A good power supply and ECC RAM make a very stable PC.

If you have ever had a corrupt file on your hard disk, ECC memory can help prevent that. Usually data corruption happens in memory (and then is saved to disk).

In short, stability. If the performance hit is low double digits, that may not even be noticeable for many use cases.

Reliability.

Whether one cares about that is one's own tradeoff.

Intel actually offers ECC memory by chipset, not CPU. If you get a board with the server-oriented chipset, it will often support a Core i5.

No ECC is supported in that configuration. If you're lucky, it works as normal RAM.

A few i3 CPUs support ECC, though.

I think it might have worked in some earlier generations of Core i, perhaps Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge.

There are some. But none in the desktop market segment. For embedded use.

All desktop segment chips with ECC have i3 designation.

See:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search/featurefi...

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