Jukka Larja (roskakori2006.delete@this.gmail.com) on January 1, 2021 10:43 am wrote:
> Gabriele Svelto (gabriele.svelto.delete@this.gmail.com) on January 1, 2021 7:10 am wrote:
> >
> > What does "officially" mean in this context? All non-APU
> > Ryzen CPUs support ECC if the motherboards have the
> > necessary traces and UEFI support. Motherboard vendors advertise this support quite clearly in the specs.
>
> Trying to google about how well the unofficial support works, I get lot of hits about people saying that
> yes, it works, without any proof. I don't see people with a test DIMMs known to produce single bit errors
> making sure the unofficial support works, or making sure it works in every CPU or at least gives some easy
> to see error somewhere if it doesn't (I'm sure someone somewhere has tested something, but it gets lost
> in the noise. Anecdotes are only useful if there's enough of them to be statistically significant).
>
> I really like what AMD is doing with CPUs, but unofficial ECC support just
> annoys me. It's supposed to give me peace of mind and eliminate one source
> of random problems. "Unofficial" really doesn't work great with that goal.

For consumer level hardware I think the weaker link is BIOS and operating system support. For most users the best they can do is verify that ECC is enabled, and then wait weeks to months to see if any reports are generated.

In the old days the memory interface was slow enough that I could have hacked together some logic and connected it to insert single bit errors but today that is close to impossible without a custom DIMM layout which supports it. I might try it with a sampling bridge operating in reverse but not on any hardware I want to keep.