> You’re blaming Intel’s CPU lineup for people not using ECC RAM on their AMD builds?

I'm blaming the decade+ of Intel dominance for killing any chance of ECC becoming popular in non-server environments, just as RAM density was reaching the point where it is absolutely essential for reliability.

> The real reason people don’t use ECC is because they don’t like paying extra for consumer builds. That’s all. ECC requires more chips, more traces, and more expense. Consumers can’t tell if there’s a benefit, so they skip it.

Motherboard traces are ~free and the feature is in the die already, so it requires zero expense to offer it to consumers. Intel chose to artificially cripple their chips to remove that option. Yes, I know there are a few oddball lines where they did offer it. They should have offered it across the board from the get go, seeing as they were selling the same dies with ECC for workstation use.

> I'm blaming the decade+ of Intel dominance for killing any chance of ECC becoming popular in non-server environments

I disagree. AMD has offered ECC support for a while and it’s not catching on. It doesn’t make sense to blame this on Intel.

> Motherboard traces are ~free and the feature is in the die already, so it requires zero expense to offer it to consumers.

Yet it’s missing from a substantial number of AMD boards, despite being supported. You have to specifically confirm the motherboard added those traces before buying it.

Traces aren’t entirely free. Modern boards are densely packed and manufacturers aren’t interested in spending extra time on routing for a feature that consumers aren’t interested in anyway.

> Traces aren’t entirely free. Modern boards are densely packed and manufacturers aren’t interested in spending extra time on routing for a feature that consumers aren’t interested in anyway.

Or they just don't care because it's not already popular and unbuffered ECC RAM isn't even particularly widely available. The delta design cost of routing another 8 data lines per DIMM channel is tiny. Especially on ATX boards and other larger formats. I could see some crazy packed mini-ITX layout where this might be a bit harder, but definitely not in the normal cases.

(I've routed a rather dense 4-layer BGA credit card sized board; not exactly a motherboard, but I do have a bit of experience with this subject. It was definitely denser than a typical ATX board per layer.)

> ...unbuffered ECC RAM isn't even particularly widely available.

Every time I've gone looking for unbuffered ECC RAM over the past three or five years, I've had no trouble finding it. In my experience, the trick is to shop for "server" RAM, rather than "desktop" RAM.

Are there speeds or capacities here that you'd particularly like to see that aren't present? <https://nemixram.com/server-memory/ecc-udimm/>

It's available, but not nearly as widely, and even less so at reasonable prices. Last time I had to buy ECC RAM over here in Japan, I had to go to a niche webshop to get a decent price on the capacity I was interested in. For every other PC part I'd just use Amazon and get it delivered next day, usually at the market lowest price or almost.

> Last time I had to buy ECC RAM over here in Japan, I had to go to a niche webshop to get a decent price on the capacity I was interested in.

I've been quite satisfied with the three orders that I've placed with Nemix. I see no indication that they _don't_ ship to Japan, and indications that they _do_ ship internationally... so consider purchasing from them next time you have a need for such memory.

Or, hell, I'd be _shocked_ if there wasn't a company in JP or or KR or CN that also does what Nemix does (that is, yank RAM from decommissioned servers, test it, and sell the stuff that's solid).

And, with Ryzen (and Ryzen Threadripper) becoming ever-more popular, I would expect ECC RAM to continue to drop in price when compared to non-ECC RAM. (But, let's be real here, when you spread the price out over five or ten years, it's _totally_ worth it to have RAM you can rely on.)

> I disagree. AMD has offered ECC support for a while and it’s not catching on. It doesn’t make sense to blame this on Intel.

It does make sense. Imagine if only 50% of web browsers supported a feature, would you implement it in your website?

Point being, the low market share of ECC-compatible setups means that the market demand for ECC is low, which means that the selection is low, which means the prices are higher than they could be. So yes, absolutely Intel has contributed massively to the issue.

ECC memory on the other hand is always going to be more expensive.

Indeed, which is why it should be an option.

OTOH, it shouldn't be significantly more expensive. It should be ~9/8 the cost of regular memory. It's just one extra chip for every 8. Nothing more.

in-band ECC is also a thing. In that scenario, you give up some capacity for the ECC bits but stay with the same DRAM config as before.

(in-band ECC is present on Elkhart Lake Atoms and on Tegra Xavier for example)

Actually less, because you only need the additional memory chip and associated trace layouting, not any additional PCB manufacturing cost (beyond miniscule yield impact of the additional traces) and no significant added distribution cost (packaging, shipping weight, etc.).

>You’re blaming Intel’s CPU lineup for people not using ECC RAM on their AMD builds?

Yes. ECC was standard on first IBM PC 5150, on PS/2 line, on pretty much all 286 clones etc. Intel killed ECC on the desktop when moving to Pentium, prior to that all of their chipset products (486) supported it. 1995 artificial market segmentation shenanigans https://www.pctechguide.com/chipsets/intels-triton-chipsets-...

They did support ECC on some i3 simply because they did not bother to double the sku, however IIRC you need the server / WS S chipset to enable it. At which point just put an entry level Xeon on that.

In the absolute the cost of ECC everywhere would not be substantially greater than the prices we have now without. The current ECC prices are high because it is not broadly used, and not really the inverse. Consumer skip it because it is fucking hard to get ECC enable parts for S SKUs (or H / U) in the current situation, while there are plenty of non-ECC vendors and resellers, and something like at least 3 times the number of SKUs. And consumers have not been informed they are buying unreliable shit.

> Intel has offered ECC support in a lot of their low-end i3 parts for a long time. They’re popular for budget server builds for this reason.

Intel removed ECC support in the 10th gen so you have to go for Xeon nowadays.

With DDR5 you can have (a form of) ECC on all current 12th-generation Core CPUs. That is, if you were able to find DDR5 DIMMs on the market, which you currently cannot.

Not really: internal ECC in DDR5 is an implementation detail that is neither exposed on the bus nor giving you the real reliability and monitoring capability that real ECC terminated in the memory controller did. It is only there because the error rate would be absolutely horrific without, so you need internal ECC to get to basically the same point you were without ECC on DDR4.

I expect in-chip ECC should still be a significant improvement for RAM reliability (any ECC is going to be better than none, even if your memory array is significantly worse; I've had my share of RAM with weak bits that would absolutely be fixed with that), but it's not going to help with bus errors and isn't nearly as transparent to system software as end to end ECC is.

In theory some weak ECC on top of particularly unreliable storage can still be less reliable than way more reliable storage not employing any ECC, but I also suspect this won't be the case here. However, if the target reliability is only say 2 or 3 times what you had DDR4 without ECC, it is still completely unsuitable for serious applications. And really we should find another name for the internal ECC of DDR5, because the services it provides is completely different from real ECC.

In the industry we already have terms of art that are better than just “ECC”. Normally we speak of EDAC, error detection and correction. We refer to them by their capabilities, such as SECDED, ChipKill, or whatever.

As far as I can tell, Intel only offered ECC on a small handful of i3 parts that mainly seemed to be marketed to NAS manufacturers, likely because they were otherwise giving up that market entirely to competitors like AMD. They really don't seem to be interested in offering it as an option on consumer desktops.