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Comment by adhoc32 | Hacker News Reader

Latest Intel desktop CPUs (i.e. i9-13900KF) supports ECC with the W680 chipset.

It's worth keeping in mind that the chipset has zero involvement in ECC. The CPU is directly attached to the memory slots. They're using the chipset as an expensive dongle.

They do it with rear I/O too. Motherboards with anything but workstation or flagship consumer chipsets typically have an anemic port selection, which is silly because for many half the reason to choose building a desktop over buying a laptop is to be able to plug in a lot of stuff without a bunch of hubs/docks/etc.

Well, the chipset does enable error detection and correction features, because it is the responsibility of the chipset to raise certain interrupts or assert this or that signal in certain error cases. You may view this as artificial segmentation but without the more advanced management engine in the Q680 and W680 chipsets, the Z690 and all lower chipsets that contain the simpler "client" i.e. consumer management engine can't enable ECC.

You're saying the memory controller sends an error signal to the chipset, and the chipset sends it back to the CPU package?

Even so that's an extremely trivial task. It doesn't need a "more advanced" anything. It needs them to not deliberately disable the code or remove the tiny tiny amount of circuit.

Then, the competition is working as expected, i.e. Ryzen had ECC unofficially for some time, now Intel has it. There're plenty of other ways to segment users, i.e. Memory Channels, PCIe lanes, etc.

I wish those motherboards didn't cost $450+, I've contemplated building a home server with a 13th gen + ECC because you also get quicksync onboard.

Exactly. $450 for a motherboard just to get ECC support is ridiculous. I don't know how it is with AM5, but on AM4, my understanding is that you could use ECC memory with many normally-priced motherboards. (Even if it wasn't "officially" supported.)

Mentioning W680 feels pointless. You've always been able to buy high-end workstation-class motherboards and stick ECC in them. The entire point of the article is that all computers should be using ECC RAM, not just the expensive, workstation class computers.

If you sincerely /need/ ECC, any amount of money is of no concern because you need it. It's just a cost of doing business, as accountants might say.

If you just /want/ ECC, then yes $450 bucks is expensive. You don't /need/ it, though, so this is neither here nor there.

> You don't /need/ it, though, so this is neither here nor there.

The whole point of this article and discussion says otherwise. Don't come to me to complain about that. Your comment should be a top-level comment complaining at the author.

I fully agree with the author that ECC should not be reserved for expensive computers, of course, but I'm just here to point out that W680 is not a response to the author's concerns at all, period. W680 is a continuation of Intel's status quo.

Also, you can use asterisks to create italics.

I believe AMD APUs also have decent hardware acceleration like quicksync, for example available through VAAPI.

Unlike the CPUs, I think the AMD APUs that support ECC (the "Pro" versions) aren't available through normal retail channels.

One of the main reasons I buy Xeon desktops is the ECC. With 128 GB of memory, and 1 bitflip/GB/year average error rate, it seems too risky to not use ECC for production work.

Real world numbers are closer to 1 bitflip/GB/hour than year because bit flips are highly correlated.

“A large-scale study based on Google's very large number of servers was presented at the SIGMETRICS/Performance '09 conference.[6] The actual error rate found was several orders of magnitude higher than the previous small-scale or laboratory studies, with between 25,000 (2.5 × 10−11 error/bit·h) and 70,000 (7.0 × 10−11 error/bit·h, or 1 bit error per gigabyte of RAM per 1.8 hours) errors per billion device hours per megabit. More than 8% of DIMM memory modules were affected by errors per year.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory

A random stick of non ECC memory might be far above average or have several errors per minute, but you just don’t know.

That study is very old and is based on long-outdated DRAM tech. I suspect that DDR5 has much lower error rates.

I would welcome more recent data, but I doubt we are talking about a 4 orders of magnitude change to get to /year vs /hour error rates.

Actually, Samsung claimed a factor of a million lower error rate in DDR5 vs DDR4 due to the on-die ECC.

Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16900/samsung-teases-512-gb-d...

> The company details a 512 GB module of DDR5 memory, running at DDR5-7200, designed for server and enterprise use.

That just shows how useful ECC memory is not that these bit flips didn’t occur.

If you scroll down a bit, the article shows a slide from Samsung claiming that DDR5 improves error rates by a factor of 10^6.

That’s a comparison with ODECC vs non ODECC memory chips not DDR5 vs DDR4.

ODECC was added because they wanted to be able to use DDR5 chips which would have had unacceptably large error rates without it. In other words that improvement is before the binning process, so they are selling chips with a vastly higher innate error rate to the point where the average DDR5 stick could actually be worse than the average DDR4 chip, it’s hard to say without large scale testing from multiple manufacturers.

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