Comment by toast0
4 hours ago
> We’ve accepted lack of ECC because Intel decided it would be a product line differentiator, and serious customers who didn’t want random crashes or to lose data would buy chips with ECC.
AMD has been allowing ECC on lots of regular hardware for a long time.
People don't tend to buy ECC for desktop use because it costs significantly more (used server ram is/was often cheap... but it often doesn't work in desktop boards), and the performance specs are poor.
My home servers are mostly retired desktops, so they get my old desktop ram and I don't want to pay premium prices for jedec speed ecc ram on my desktops, thanks.
Since DDR5 doesn't include reporting on bit errors (afaik), it likely means much fewer single bit errors, but most experienced errors will be multi-bit. Although, I dunno what proportion of bit errors is on the ram chips and what's on the bus... there's no protection from bus errors.
If there were reporting, you could replace chips with high error rates, but without reporting you'll keep running them until they fail enough to notice.
> AMD has been allowing ECC on lots of regular hardware for a long time.
Often unsupported or untested by the motherboard manufacturer, because of the precedent set quite a while ago.
> because it costs significantly more [...] and the performance specs are poor
Because it's niche. If a large share of the desktop market was using ECC memory, the extra cost would have been 10-12%, and a typical kit would push the clocks and timings at least as much as non-ECC memory.