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Comment by p_l | Hacker News Reader

The difference is that AMD doesn't disable ECC support in any model line, while Intel disables it, sometimes without rhyme.

Extra funny when you notice that certain Xeon lines are actually i7 with different branding and ECC left enabled.

The problems with ECC on AMD comes from consumer vendors not putting the time into testing, and possibly not even connecting the ECC lines (remember, ECC requires putting additional traces between memory controller and memory slots). Then you have to deal with whatever customisation the vendor of the motherboard did to firmware - their changes might have resulted in effective disabling of ECC.

With Intel, you either have the same game as above (with the non-Xeon ECC-capable parts), or pay through the nose for comparable performance "workstation/enterprise" gear, as ECC support being used for market segmentation by intel is pretty much an open secret.

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You don't need to pay through the nose with Intel, at least for latest generation. 10900K costs $499. 10900K with ECC called Xeon W-1290P and costs $539. That's 8% extra. ASUS Pro WS W480-Ace is $280 which is reasonable cost for a good motherboard.

How do you discover which Xeon is the i7 version of the same chip or vice versa? Is it just spelunking through Intel Ark to find a same generation, clock speeds Xeon or is there more to it?

Something like that, yes. Specs are almost identical. There are CPU families so I picked best models from a family and compared them.

Would be interesting to compare die shots.

Any of the Xeon Ws are just rebranded i7s, others might be as well. You can tell because they have the DMI memory bus instead of the Xeon exclusive UPI interconnect.

I picked up a i3-9100 a few months back because its was a low cost processor with ECC (for an edge/embedded solution). The problem then becomes the motherboard, and it seems intel has just shifted the ECC tax from the processor to the motherboard/chipset. That core fits on a lot of low cost motherboards, but to enable ECC requires about another $100 chipset tax.

I was with you until the mobo cost. Wtf, $280 for a mobo?? A totally decent B550 mobo with ECC support can be had for less than half that price.

The only advantage of Intel Xeon at this point is RDIMM/LR-DIMM support on their Xeon-W platform. AMD supports that only on Epyc and Threadripper Pro.

Yeah, with Haswell you could get an i7-4770 for like $320 or a Xeon E3-1245v3 (includes an iGPU) that ran the same clock speed and spec, generally, but was about $270. If you went for the 1241v3 you lost the iGPU and 4 watts of power usage but gain +100mhz base clock.

And that gen of CPUS had low power T-series chips rated at 65w where today it's 35w. The power drop is part of why I'm happy with my SFF setup as the thermals are quite good on 14nm locked CPUs like my 7700.

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