News AMD confirms Ryzen 8000G APUs don't support ECC RAM, despite initial claims

[Admin]

AMD removes ECC mention from specifications of Ryzen 8000G AM5 CPUs, despite initially claiming support at launch.

AMD confirms Ryzen 8000G APUs don't support ECC RAM, despite initial claims : Read more

 

[Amdlova]

For now, it'sd unclear when that will happen, but it is reasonable to expect them to arrive in the coming months.


IT'S D Tenacious D.

That notebook CPU only support it self. It's a "meh" product

 

[stanos4]

haha, there are many non-pro apus that claim ECC support. Let alone that all non-pro non apus for both am4 and am5 support ecc.
to give an example of some non-pro apus with ecc:
zen4 7540U: https://www.amd.com/en/product/13211
zen3+ 7735HS: https://www.amd.com/en/product/12941
zen3+ 6800U: https://www.amd.com/en/product/11591
zen3 5825U: https://www.amd.com/en/product/11601
there are even manufacturer(s) claiming ecc working on apu (7840hs) where amd claims ecc is not working - bedrock 7000: https://www.solid-run.com/industrial-computers/bedrock-r7000/#specifications
or possibly the Changwang board you published few days ago.... https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-mobile-cpus-power-new-mini-itx-motherboards

and yes, I'm super pissed off on AMD for this. This is completely unnecessary arbitrary choice of functionality removal. I'm even quite confident they go only against themselves, as these apus are in no position to compete against anything else they have / there already are products that compete either way. Could have been a lovely low power (<~10W idle) small home server. The best now can hope for, is to again wait further if some manufacturer releases sbc with ecc support on a modern apu (no, v2000 or v3000 are not modern) to masses.

 

[abufrejoval]

That is terrible news. And it seems a paradigm shift towards the exact type of market segmentation that AMD decried when Zen was launched.

I understand that technically the validation effort and even the process effort potentially required to add all of these functionalities (certificate management) to a chips is not trivial. But whereas the certificate management may reallyb e a per-device installation effort, the ECC validation generally is a per product effort that will need to get done anyway and perhaps a minimal amount of per device testing effort during manufacturing.

Drawing the line there shows that AMD is pinching pennies.

Now it wouldn't be all too bad, if the 'pro' variants could actually be obtained as easily as the non-pro chips: I don't mind paying €5-10 extra for the feature.

But from past experience the pro chips are very difficult to get making ECC support a significant barrier, while the need for real ECC goes up with process density and RAM capacity.

Actually the only good news in the ECC arena has been that prices and availability of modules had improved to a point where that wasn't the real barrier... which now has just shifted again to the SoCs.

 

[thestryker]

AMD's approach to Zen ECC support on desktop has been atrocious from the start. Every chip supports it, but no motherboards are required to have it so in effect it's barely better than Intel's approach. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if these did actually support ECC memory, but no board that supports it will support them.

 

[wbfox]

That is terrible news. And it seems a paradigm shift towards the exact type of market segmentation that AMD decried when Zen was launched.

I understand that technically the validation effort and even the process effort potentially required to add all of these functionalities (certificate management) to a chips is not trivial. But whereas the certificate management may reallyb e a per-device installation effort, the ECC validation generally is a per product effort that will need to get done anyway and perhaps a minimal amount of per device testing effort during manufacturing.

Drawing the line there shows that AMD is pinching pennies.

Now it wouldn't be all too bad, if the 'pro' variants could actually be obtained as easily as the non-pro chips: I don't mind paying €5-10 extra for the feature.

But from past experience the pro chips are very difficult to get making ECC support a significant barrier, while the need for real ECC goes up with process density and RAM capacity.

Actually the only good news in the ECC arena has been that prices and availability of modules had improved to a point where that wasn't the real barrier... which now has just shifted again to the SoCs.

The non-pro "G" APUs have never supported ECC........

 

[wbfox]

AMD's approach to Zen ECC support on desktop has been atrocious from the start. Every chip supports it, but no motherboards are required to have it so in effect it's barely better than Intel's approach. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if these did actually support ECC memory, but no board that supports it will support them.

Wow, you're special. AsrockRack, TYAN and ASUS have put out rock solid boards that use ECC. Just because you don't know about something, doesn't mean they don't exist. Shocker, many of them have, gasp, 10 gig networking and IPMI!

 

[thestryker]

Wow, you're special. AsrockRack, TYAN and ASUS have put out rock solid boards that use ECC. Just because you don't know about something, doesn't mean they don't exist. Shocker, many of them have, gasp, 10 gig networking and IPMI!

Congrats you win the idiot prize where did I say you couldn't get them? Oh yeah I didn't as I compared them to Intel who requires a specific chipset to get ECC support for desktop class and said their implementation is barely better than Intel's. If you can't actually read and understand what is being said maybe you should just find something else to do with your time.

 

[bit_user]

expect AMD's yet-to-be-announced Ryzen Pro 8000G APUs to support ECC

I wouldn't have a problem with having to pay extra for a Ryzen Pro, as I have previously bought Xeon CPUs for this reason. ...except, they don't sell them retail-boxed!!!

If AMD is going to hold back features like this, they really should put at least a couple SKUs in the retail channel that have them. And yes, I'm aware you can find them used, but I should be able to buy one with a full warranty - just like their other desktop CPU models!

 

[bit_user]

That is terrible news. And it seems a paradigm shift towards the exact type of market segmentation that AMD decried when Zen was launched.

Nah, it's absolutely not news. AMD has played this game with their APUs since the very first Ryzen 2000G models, IIRC.

Drawing the line there shows that AMD is pinching pennies.

No, I think it's a different game. You have to consider that you & I can't buy Ryzen Pro on the open market. They only sell them to OEMs. I think it's an enticement they have reserved for big OEMs. I'm not really sure why, but maybe AMD won't even sell their Pro SKUs to small whitebox builders, giving big OEMs an exclusive lock on the corporate market?

Actually the only good news in the ECC arena has been that prices and availability of modules had improved to a point where that wasn't the real barrier... which now has just shifted again to the SoCs.

It got worse with DDR5, for a couple of reasons. The ECC UDIMM market is smaller for DDR5 because all of the proper workstation CPUs now require RDIMMs, so that's problem #1, limiting selection and manufacturer incentive to have competitive offerings. The second problem is that DDR5 ECC UDIMMs now require 25% more DRAM chips than non-ECC, whereas DDR4 DIMMs only required 12.5% more. That will impact the price, for sure.

Finally, people read that DDR5 has on-die ECC and some of them probably think that means you no longer benefit from having ECC at the DIMM-level, or perhaps they think the distinction is completely gone? I expect this market confusion undermines demand ever further, which doesn't help at all with the pricing, availability, and specs of said DIMMs.

 

[bit_user]

AMD's approach to Zen ECC support on desktop has been atrocious from the start. Every chip supports it,

Nope. Their non-Pro APUs really don't (i.e. it's truly disabled). Look at the ASRock Rack AM4 server boards' documentation and they'll tell you this. They support ECC on all AM4 CPUs except the non-pro APUs.

 

[bit_user]

AsrockRack, TYAN and ASUS have put out rock solid boards that use ECC. Just because you don't know about something, doesn't mean they don't exist. Shocker, many of them have, gasp, 10 gig networking and IPMI!

FYI, Supermicro has an AM5 board with IPMI and ECC support.

 

[thestryker]

Nope. Their non-Pro APUs really don't (i.e. it's truly disabled). Look at the ASRock Rack AM4 server boards' documentation and they'll tell you this. They support ECC on all AM4 CPUs except the non-pro APUs.

So it's a classic case of artificial segmentation then? It'll be interesting to see if the 7040 minipcs that claim ECC support actually do. All of the Zen 3+ APUs support ECC which seems to be a change from Zen 3. I thought maybe there weren't pro versions but there were so I got nothing.

 

[bit_user]

It'll be interesting to see if the 7040 minipcs that claim ECC support actually do. All of the Zen 3+ APUs support ECC which seems to be a change from Zen 3.

You're still talking about BGA (laptop-oriented) models, whereas the article is talking about an AM5 socketed processor. So far, what we haven't seen is any change in AMD's policy regarding those.

 

[Xajel]

This has been always the case, non-Pro APU's doesn't support ECC officially, sometimes AMD will list ECC support and sometimes no.

Either case, the platform must support ECC as well. And even if it works, it won't be supported officially from AMD as AMD only officially support ECC on Pro APUs and CPUs.

But honestly, I wish AMD will support the APUs as well, because they always promoted not limiting features by disabling them intentionally like how Intel do.

 

[chaz_music]

AMD has always been a little fickle with their attitude toward ECC. For me as an engineer and someone who uses many PCs for work (CAD, data analytics, simulations, etc.), I find it frustrating that the CPU manufacturers regard the memory subsystem protection as a "premium" feature. Almost all other subsystems have error correction including PCIe bus, SSDs, TCP/IP, ZFS filesystem or ReFS, etc. Charging more for ECC is so 1990s.

I just checked and I found several embedded CPUs for less than $10 that have ECC. If ECC became standard, even the connector cost would become parity (pun intended) with the smaller DIMM slots due to plain volume costing. The same argument was made against USB when it first started: "Two USB ports per board is going to cost too much! I want my cheap and common DB-9 for my mouse!" Now we get unhappy if there are less than 4-6 USB ports on the back of a motherboard. The same would happen to ECC memory slots, and we would fill a gap in the electronic data protection for everyone's PC.

 

[wbfox]

AMD has always been a little fickle with their attitude toward ECC. For me as an engineer and someone who uses many PCs for work (CAD, data analytics, simulations, etc.), I find it frustrating that the CPU manufacturers regard the memory subsystem protection as a "premium" feature. Almost all other subsystems have error correction including PCIe bus, SSDs, TCP/IP, ZFS filesystem or ReFS, etc. Charging more for ECC is so 1990s.

I just checked and I found several embedded CPUs for less than $10 that have ECC. If ECC became standard, even the connector cost would become parity (pun intended) with the smaller DIMM slots due to plain volume costing. The same argument was made against USB when it first started: "Two USB ports per board is going to cost too much! I want my cheap and common DB-9 for my mouse!" Now we get unhappy if there are less than 4-6 USB ports on the back of a motherboard. The same would happen to ECC memory slots, and we would fill a gap in the electronic data protection for everyone's PC.

Holy...Ryzen(non X), RyzenX, Ryzen Pro G, Ryzen Pro GE, Ryzen R, Ryzen V ALLLLLLLLLLLLL support ECC. The ONLY desktop line that does not and NEVER has is the Ryzen (NON PRO) G series.

How is a single product line out of all of their CPUs not supporting ECC fickle? It has been this way since the very start of Ryzen. That is the exact opposite of fickle.

Motherboards have to also support ECC. That has NOTHING to do with AMD (unlike Intel). That is up to the board manufacturer and no one else.

If you have found a $10 embedded CPU that supports ECC, you should go buy them, and flip them for 20X the price to the enterprise and NAS market.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Holy...Ryzen(non X), RyzenX, Ryzen Pro G, Ryzen Pro GE, Ryzen R, Ryzen V ALLLLLLLLLLLLL support ECC. The ONLY desktop line that does not and NEVER has is the Ryzen (NON PRO) G series.

One small caveat regarding CPU support you need to look out for: some desktop Ryzen CPUs reuse APU dies. E.g. Ryzen 5 5500. These do not support ECC, despite not being branded as (non-Pro) G series

 

[TJ Hooker]

As far as AM4 boards with official ECC support, I get they're technically available but at least in Canada they're hard to find and/or cost 4+ times as much as a regular board. As others have said, in practice it may have been better (for consumers) if AMD had mandated ECC support for a specific chipset, as Intel does.

 

[bit_user]

If ECC became standard, even the connector cost would become parity (pun intended) with the smaller DIMM slots due to plain volume costing.

There's simply no way to make the cost of the 25% extra DRAM chips on an ECC DDR5 DIMM go away. Commercial pressures will always incentivize OEMs to cheap out, here, as will some customers' willingness to pay a premium for ECC. As long as the reliability of non-ECC DIMMs is adequate that it doesn't constitute a support/warranty liability, I expect we'll continue to see it dominate the mainstream. Indeed, this is what DDR5's on-die ECC is all about - breathing a bit more life into the viability of non-ECC setups!

The same argument was made against USB when it first started: "Two USB ports per board is going to cost too much!

I think the difference is that silicon density improvements have made USB controller circuitry cheaper to the point that you can scale them up almost for free. As for the extra connectors and motherboard traces... those aren't on the same order of magnitude as the cost of extra DRAM chips.

However, Intel has been implementing a very attractive alternative: in-band ECC! It works by using commodity non-ECC memory, and reserving a portion of the address space to hold the ECC bits. There's an impact on usable memory capacity and performance, but it's not a bad tradeoff for having similar reliability to out-of-band ECC. Anandtech benchmarked it on a Raptor Lake SoC:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/18732/asrock-industrial-nucs-box1360pd4-review-raptor-lakep-ecc/2
​

Unfortunately, far be it from Intel to turn down an opportunity for market segmentation. If their memory controller has this capability, they should offer it on a wide spectrum of SKUs (if not simply all of them). Unsurprisingly, they do not.

 

[bit_user]

The ONLY desktop line that does not and NEVER has is the Ryzen (NON PRO) G series.

How is a single product line out of all of their CPUs not supporting ECC fickle?

Again, my real beef is that they don't give us the option to buy these Pro G-series APUs at retail.

How messed up does the market need to be for a chipmaker to repeatedly turn down customers willing to pay a premium, by not selling them a product you already have and support???

 

[thestryker]

However, Intel has been implementing a very attractive alternative: in-band ECC! It works by using commodity non-ECC memory, and reserving a portion of the address space to hold the ECC bits. There's an impact on usable memory capacity and performance, but it's not a bad tradeoff for having similar reliability to out-of-band ECC.

It makes me very sad they haven't enabled this across all of the CPUs. At least with segmenting ECC I can see the SKU strategy, but this seems so weirdly hit and miss.

There's simply no way to make the cost of the 25% extra DRAM chips on an ECC DDR5 DIMM go away. Commercial pressures will always incentivize OEMs to cheap out, here, as will some customers' willingness to pay a premium for ECC. As long as the reliability of non-ECC DIMMs is adequate that it doesn't constitute a support/warranty liability, I expect we'll continue to see it dominate the mainstream. Indeed, this is what DDR5's on-die ECC is all about - breathing a bit more life into the viability of non-ECC setups!

I would love to see AMD and Intel make ECC support mandatory on at least the X/Z chipset boards as the majority of the desktop CPUs from both already support ECC. I don't see any meaningful disadvantage for them doing so.

On Intel's side that would at least save them some rebranding (W680 is just Z690) and simplify their OEMs stack. It wouldn't eat into the enterprise market as I'm sure we're not going to see IPMI and a plethora of networking options on gaming motherboards just because ECC became mandatory. Since UDIMMs are going to require clock drivers from 6400+ we could see ECC UDIMMs with higher frequencies and lower latency than JEDEC like we've seen with RDIMMs if they made the potential market wider by mandating support.

 

[abufrejoval]

The non-pro "G" APUs have never supported ECC........

Intel has been infamous for fusing off parts and features from chips which evidently supported them in hardware to segment the market and gouge extra money for features present in the hardware.

AMD has attacked that in their marketing and advertised that they don't do such artificial feature cutting when they launched Zen.

And with the APUs they started to do the same, disabling features that are physically present in the hardware and then playing the market segmentation game they criticized with Intel.

Let's be clear: just like the discrete IODs, all APUs have ECC hardware support. But on IOD based products, ECC isn't fused off, even if it's not actively marketed, while on APUs it's subject to feature culling.

And it's not just made a cost issue, where ECC or memory encryption are offered at an incremental price that correlates with production overhead. Instead the market segmentation extends into the distribution channels in such a manner that the backbone of the Personal Computer industry, the personal consumer, is robbed of choice.

That is a change of AMD strategy which has ramifications far broader than this chip and I'm sure few like that unless they work for AMD or own their stock.

 

[chaz_music]

I don't anyone is thinking about the idiocy that we have error correction in nearly ALL other PC subsystems, with the notable exception of memory. Even the filesystems are getting error correction with ZFS and ReFS. And I think all of the current SSD products have error correction built in = making it cost parity as the market expects it to just be there. I have seen many market shifts that learned to adapt and absorb a change to keep the features up and cost down. This, from my experience, would be no different.

 

[chaz_music]

If you have found a $10 embedded CPU that supports ECC, you should go buy them, and flip them for 20X the price to the enterprise and NAS market.

DId you even do a quick search before making your comment? There are tons of cheap embedded CPUs/MCUs with ECC. Otherwise the mission critical designs would have a market vacuum. I found tons on Digikey and Mouser within 2 minutes.

For instance, here is a Microchip PIC24FJ64 in Digikey for $1.97 in quantities of 100 with ECC right at the top of the datasheet:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technology/PIC24FJ64GU205-I-PT/13557953

Here is a Maxim M4 based CPU with ECC everything (Flash, SRAM, DRAM) for $4.81 in quantities of 980 or higher:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products...s-inc-maxim-integrated/MAX32672GTLBL/18693459

There are also other ARM based chips, some from NXP, ST, etc. Pretty easy to find. You should take a look. If there are already markets using ECC and it is having no drastic cost impediment, why couldn't the PC world do the same? The PC industry has the user conned into believing that there would be a drastic cost hurdle if ECC was across the board, even though it is already there in other markets. I believe psychologist have a term called "learned helplessness", and tech giants use that along with user linear thinking to manipulate markets and maximize profit.