Perhaps motherboard manufacturers consider those who want ECC support to buy Threadripper anyway so testing ECC support is low priority?
Both X650E and X670E have Guaranteed: 1x16 or 2x8 PCIe 5.0 AND x4 NVMe PCIe 5.0. So worst case scenario for E-series motherboards is that "only" 24 lanes of 28 PCIe capable lines are used for PCIe 5.0. That is still better than Intel's best case scenario.
I also use AMD for virtual machine use and no real complaints so far. I have 4 NVMe drives and while fourth is behind pretty slow bus, you cannot have everything from motherboard staying around $500 price. AMD is basically adding more features, not removing them. While still making able for motherboard manufacturers to offer boards on wide price range.
You are right about nearly everything you said. So I often post things in a sarcastic manner because I know people are more inclined to read it. I try to be funny, there are people who find my posts funny and other who hate seeing my name in the comments section. This leads to me making endless chains of replies in the comments sections about what I actually meant and then spending more time defending myself than actually spending time doing useful things.
With that out of the way, I had a conversation with a friend of mine lately who is into tech as a hobby in the same way that I am. We both have other careers we use to finance our hobby in the same way that people who like race cars don't make their money from racing. You can't LS swap an AM5 system. That's fine.
So much of the source of my frustration is based in the unnecessary consumerism of the platforms advertising. I'm actually going to take decent bit of my Friday to write this out properly so I'd appreciate if you used some of your time to read what I'm writing because I'm spending a lot of time writing it without sarcasm or any of that stuff.
So this started with AM4 and the 1800x. I had 4 1800x's in my server rack at one point with 64gigs in each of them, but that was back in 2018 and you could get each one (cpu,mobo,ram combo) for under 400 each. 8 cores with 64 gigs of ram with no ecc support? So I can have 32 cores and 265gigs of ram for under $1600 and all I have to sacrifice is ECC support and and PCIe lanes I don't even need? Great!
Well,later in the AM4 life cycle they started with 16 cores on a system and 128GB of ram. 64GB was understandable, but you start getting into 128GB plus and ECC starts to become a requirement. We do have to draw the line somewhere. We can get away with GPU memory issues not having ECC, but CPUs are a very different story.
When the RAM on a computer doesn't have ECC it permeates throughout everything from where the error starts. Where we are at with billions and trillions if transistors, the probability of errors happening becomes far more likely. Go back 20 years and we had bigger transistors and less of them, there were tons of things you could do without ECC. Now they're so small that we use quantum wave theory to create an inference that creates roughly "square" angles.
The marketing and PC market is trying to sell us tons of RAM, tons of PCIe devices on the CONSUMER side of things. That'd what I have a problem with. They are trying to sell us all these products and they won't work unless they give us more PCIe lanes or memory with ECC.
So while it is nice I can buy old Epyc hardware to fuel my hobby, it's also frustrating that I see modern cpus with 16 cores and 256GB of memory support in a consumer socket without ECC support.
The PCIe limitation I can work around, but I see that become a problem quickly. It's the reason I always give a tantrum over it. When games start using 32GB+ of ram then ECC will be necessary. I'm really mad about AM5 because it'll still be around during next without things like ECC and won't have enough PCIe lanes to not fill your computer without bottlenecks.
Amd can give us 256GB of ECC memory without competing with threadripper or epyc. AMD has gotten to the point where they create a good enough product that they don't need to intentionally limit their consumer products that they're thinking will compete with their professional or enterprise sector.
I'm fine being limited to 16 cores and 256GB of ram. I can work with that in a hobby setting. Why do you need to remove ECC on top of that?
But AMD is going to start releasing 32 core "consumer level" chips with zen6. 8 cores with 64GB gigs of ram was fine. If we start getting into the 32 core/256GB memory territory with just a few PCIe lanes that's coming in the next few years, what the hell are we doing?
You can't use that many cores and that much RAM without error correcting. Why create a consumer product with it? At this point you create a problem with system instability where it can barely do general functions instead of work. not ever as advertised, but as paid for because this hobby gets expensive QUICKLY.
It's frustrating because I will never buy something like a 7950x because even though the cores are faster, the lack of PCIe and ECC will never allow me to use one properly. I'm better off buying used hardware on eBay, by atleast one order of magnitude, than buying these new high end CPUs.
I spent 20 years in my current career and want to spend some of my excess income on my IT hobby.
So, I guess, in conclusion, what's going on right now doesn't make any sense. We are reaching a point where the amount of required ram for basic tasks is going to require ECC support. I, personally, fell that we aren't holding these companies accountable. Going back to the friend I was talking to, we were talking about how buying used Intel consumer hardware might be the way to go just because they have ECC support.
community.amd.com
