Right. The more important Linus to speak up for ECC isn't Torvalds. It's Linus Sebastian, of Linus Tech Tips. He's made a few videos on ECC targeted towards gamers. Gamers drive the enthusiast PC market and when they start caring, more ECC gets made which will drive the cost down a bit. Last time I bought 32GB DDR4 UDIMM ECC there was literally one SKU. Not manufacturer. Not brand. SKU. One single item in production in the entire world. 16GB wasn't much better off, either.
It's a hard sell, though. Non-ECC will always be cheaper because it costs less to produce. Gamers don't really care that ECC prevents one crash in years because they are used to frequent crashes already. They are largely being fed dogshit from the AAA gaming industry and they have learned to just deal with it. Crashes are just part of being on the bleeding edge of gaming and Nvidia/Radeon drivers. One less crash in a sea of crashes isn't something gamers are lining up for. But a better model GPU or bigger SSD? It's an obvious choice.
I work on GPU drivers for one of those companies.
We regularly get reports and backtraces that cannot be reproduced, or "Cannot Happen" without some external factor (e.g. some other bit of code poking around our memory space). Often they're just silently dropped or ignored on the long tail of issues that nobody can get any traction on.
My understanding is the stats from hyperscalers is that ECC correction events happen a lot more than "Common Knowledge" may imply - I wonder just what proportion of things that are blamed on software may actually be due to hardware issues like this?
Again, without a significant change in the market (IE enough gamers start using ECC to actually be statistically relevant and comparing stability) this cannot really be tested, but I've wondered.
The real way to make ECC happen industry wide is for OS vendors like Microsoft to make it a platform requirement. A no ECC, no boot policy would change things overnight. Sadly, we can't even get DRAM manufacturers to fix row hammer properly, so the likelihood of this happening is pretty much nil.
So many people grumble, but I'm not really sure Intel should push ECC if desktops users aren't willing to pay a modest premium for it.
Many cheer AMD, which does not disable ECC on desktop chips, but neither do they promise ECC will actually work. It's a confusing mess between physical capacity (ram increases by 16GB when you add a 16GB dimm), and the actual correction of errors and telling the OS about the event. Only on the EPYC does AMD test and certify that ECC will work.
People don’t care, because people don’t know. RowHammer-vulnerable RAM is like canned food with botulinum and gasoline with lead. In 100 years, we’ll all be flabbergasted that everyone in the industry wasn’t arrested for letting it happen.
Do I want ECC, sure. Would bitflips ECC could prevent be in any in the top 10 reasons in year for file corruption, application crashes, and OS crashes etc... unlikely.
Track row activation counts for real, no estimates and no hash tables, and you're not vulnerable to this.
$50 more for the motherboard and $100 more for the RAM is not a "modest premium" for most of the desktop market. But aside from that, the bigger problem is that consumers (and especially gamers) will always prioritize the advantages that are more easily quantified. When forced to choose between ECC support and a few hundred MHz plus the option to overclock further, consumers will pick the faster processor.
If Intel offered a part at the high end of the product line that had both ECC and overclocking enabled, it would be guaranteed to sell quite a few units, because a lot of consumers will always want to own the top of the line part. And such a part would be an opportunity for a better experiment to determine how much premium users are willing to pay for ECC, if Intel also kept offering the current -K overclockable parts that don't have ECC.
It's not really a supported config, there's no guarantee it will work, no promise from AMD (other than it's not disabled), and you can't return a Ryzen CPU because the ECC doesn't work.
Various tests from various reddit posts show that some vendors "qualify" ECC dimms as working (an inserted Dimm increases ram available), some correct bits but don't correctly tell the kernel, and others actually do correct and report. So it's basically just a big mess. I'd buy an Epyc, but sadly unlike Intel the premium for a "server" chip is huge, if you can find them anywhere near MSRP. I looked for a Epyc 7313p near MRSP (announced in March 2021) without luck and finally gave up and bought a Ryzen.
With all that said, ASRock is from what I can tell the best AMD motherboard company to support ECC with AMD. I've got a ASRock X570D4U, other than it refusing to allow sharing a IPMI/BMC interface with the system, I'm pretty happy with it.
ECC is only officially supported on the Ryzen Threadripper PRO, and that's largely because it uses registered memory which will practically always have ECC capability.
Regular Ryzen PRO CPUs have the same ECC support as non-PRO Ryzen CPUs: functional, but not validated by AMD.
Ryzen PRO APUs have (non-validated) support for ECC, whereas non-PRO APUs don't support ECC at all.
What is the order of magnitude of ECC correction events?
I can actually give you a GAMING (or at least enthusiast) use case for ECC, too: memory overclock validation. Right now, it's kind of a dark art, but ECC failures would absolutely give you a very explicit early warning that you're pushing the CPU IMC too hard.
[0] Pronounced LIE-nus
[1] Pronounced lee-nus
I hope that ecc will give more warning that you're close to the edge (e.g. any ecc correction means it's unstable and you should back off), but fear people will just keep pushing until the ecc can no longer even correct the errors.
Professionally I work on gpu drivers for systems that do not allow overclocking, so shouldn't affect our stats, but it certainly is a mess for other teams. I've noticed that it's even become a common suggestion on fan forums for gpu manufacturers to disable any overclock and revalidate when changing vendors or even updating drivers, presumably as they're so close to the edge small changes in the access patterns will then cause it to explode.
A system with no error correction has to be so close to perfect. Even if you put in much worse cells, going from zero error correction to mild error correction should leave you significantly better off.
I doubt any manufacturer would make that public, however, but an estimate may be made if error rates actually start increasing in the real world due to ddr5 allowing this.
I agree that end-to-end ECC really should be the default for consumer products these days, but so long as the big players see it as a "Professional User" product differentiation point it'll always be more expensive than it should be.