Jason Snyder (jmcsnyder.delete@this.hotmail.com) on January 4, 2021 1:44 pm wrote:
> I was kind of surprised when Linus Torvalds went for a Threadripper with only ECC UDIMM support
> (with UDIMMS being so hard to find) and the other Linus (Sebastian) didn't even use ECC RAM when
> building the system for Torvalds.

I want to clarify something that you - and a lot of other commenters - don't seem to get.

I do not care very much about whether my system has ECC or not. That's not the issue. If I have memory errors, I am actually tech savvy enough to figure them out. Plus I end up using fairly "safe" machines - I make sure my power delivery is over-specced, I live basically at sea level, I don't overclock anything, and I buy reputable stuff.

In fact, I personally don't rally want to have anything at all to do with "special hardware". I'm a huge believer in the mass market. I don't want custom machines. Yes, I end up going fairly high-end, but I want a high-end normal machine.

So my personal machine is actually the least of my problems. People who think this is some kind of private and personal "I'm special, and I need ECC" are completely and utterly misguided, and don't understand the problem.

The problem is that Intel's policies have made ECC so rare in the mass market. Even people who would like to use it are effectively kept from using it because it's not worth the special hardware and limitations that it involves.

So repeat after me: "Linus' personal machine doesn't matter - the overall market does".

I've seen some ridiculous garbage in this thread, like "gamers don't want ECC". That's total drivel. Gamers that build high-end gaming workstations for overclocking should be some of the main target of ECC, because without ECC you don't really know if - and how high - you can safely overclock your RAM.

ECC is safer under normal circumstances, but it also allows you to do more and live on the edge more, in other words. You can actually see when you're getting too close to the edge when the machine starts reporting a lot of correctable errors!

Or at least, that's how it should work. But if the market has been told "only servers use ECC", then what happens is that ECC memory isn't for people who want to live on the edge, instead it's sold as de-rated for all those boring people who want to run databases. Ugh.

So now that stupid "ECC is for servers" fairy tale means that gamers can't find the high-frequency ECC they want, so they skip it - even if they otherwise had a machine that could do it.

See? It's about the market.

And those high-end gamers already spend extra on motherboards and blinky lights and cool cases (in both senses of "cool"), and they have absolutely no reason not to spend an extra 12% or whatever on ECC DRAM. They'd probably gobble it up, if it was just available. But ECC UDIMM's traditionally were in the really boring categories, certainly not in the "overclockable DDR4-3200" kind of thing.

So high-end PC gamers are a prime example of people who should actually want ECC, but the whole idiotic "ECC is only for serious people" mantra is a disease that has taken its mental toll on people in addition to skewing the market in completely the wrong way. And so in this very thread, I saw somebody mention gamers as somebody who wouldn't want ECC.

Pure and utter drivel.

And an example of that whole crazy mindset - and market - that Intel and others have fostered.

Please, people. Stop spreading those fairy tales. The only reason Intel says "ECC is for servers and embedded" is because Intel marketing people have convinced the powers that be that they can sell otherwise inferior chips for a higher price by enabling ECC functionality. Look at the kinds of chips that Intel sells with ECC - those Xeons (and embedded Core i3 Atom class CPUs) sure don't tend to be better in other ways.

Don't fall for the bullshit. ECC is not for servers. ECC is for everybody, and wanting to pay a bit extra for RAM shouldn't mean that you are then limited in other ways.

Linus