Comment by PragmaticPulp
4 years ago
> 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.
1 reply →
> 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.