It is officially supported on TR and Epyc, as well as Pentiums, i3s, and Xeons (entry-level Xeons are nowhere near as expensive as people think they are).
If you think you need ECC my advice is to build out around a platform where you won't be the first person to try something and run into the bugs. There is not a large community of ECC-users on Ryzen.
But if your production environment goes tits-up then your savings go out the window and a whole lot more besides. And that's what you're risking by running a hardware configuration that is non-validated/unsupported.
People constantly make the mistake of assuming that businesses need to pinch pennies on their money-generating assets, just like they do on the rigs they use for entertainment at home. In the business world, reliability and official support trump an extra $1k in your pocket every time.
Forget Xeons entirely: there are still a lot of customers who buy Sun/Oracle/IBM hardware even though it costs tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars extra. $1k does not even register for a lot of businesses.
(ECC is validated on Epyc, of course - but the prices are a lot closer to Xeons there, it's no longer a slam-dunk. You have to look at it on a case-by-case basis to determine which is actually a better deal for your workload. And frankly AMD has been doing an undue amount of massaging on their benchmarks here, like in their launch data where they just straight-up removed 43% from all the Intel benchmarks. )
http://techreport.com/review/32125/amd-epyc-7000-series-cpus...
The Xeon has a slightly higher base clock, slightly lower turbo (all clocks are changed by 0.1 GHz), ECC, and a locked clock multiplier. It appears to benchmark consistently a couple of percent below the i7.
What's even the point of that product segmentation existing? To annoy their customers? I'd rather just buy a $300 processor that checks all the feature boxes instead of all but one.
http://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_xeon_e3_1245_...
I believe this is called agglomeration[0][1], and may have parallels beyond physical, competing stores, into realms like similar, but differently named CPU's.
[0]http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0042098017694131 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
edit: rplst8 mentions binning, and that seems like another likely factor as well.
Mobile chips are very small, under powered, and under clocked. They get fabbed first.
Then your core i3/i5/i7/E3's are all fabbed. As the process matures and can be expected to regularly handle 4GHz.
Next your E5/E7's get ran, normally in a few waves. Your _enthusiast_/workstation cores are generally fabbed with E5/E7 engineer samples which get sent out for testing. These have [1] 20+ cores so you need to know your process is stable so you don't have to sell >50% of them as 8-16core Xeons.
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But yeah the product segmentation is mostly to gate access. Only Xeons offer ECC [1].
And only [1] i5/i7 offer unlocked multiplers.
Ultimately this started to be a organization issue. Consumer sales (i3/i5/i7) doesn't even talk to enterprise sales (E5/E7). Consumer support can't answer questions about enterprise chips.
My personal opinion is the only reason Intel is still in business is they have a monopoly. Their anti-consumer practices are down right twisted.
[1] can/only are strong words there are a lot of exceptions/gotchas in Intel's product lines. Celerons/Pentiums sometimes have ECC, i3's and Pentiums have had unlocked Multiplers. There is a line of Xeons with unlocked multiplers. IDK
> And only [1] i5/i7 offer unlocked multiplers.
These statements are false, which you yourself acknowledge later in your post. You don't get credit for noting a caveat when the caveat is that your point is entirely false, at least in my book.
Intel no longer manufactures 2-core Xeons so Pentiums and i3s support ECC nowadays. This isn't uncommon, this has been the norm literally since they stopped making 2C Xeons (Haswell?).
And there are currently unlocked i3s in the lineup, just like there have been unlocked Pentiums in the past. It's the norm that Intel offers a barnburner overclockable SKU somewhere in the low end. They don't always, but they do it probably every other generation.
What's up with the i3-6320 supporting ECC but the i3-7320 no longer supporting it? Intel is at the least, very inconsistent with ECC on the consumer side.
Or maybe the MSRPs vary wildly, but in practice prices converged?
Note that the ECC on the processor's internal data buses and caches is completely independent of whatever ECC the memory controller may or may not use.