ECC has been used as an artificial market segmentation mechanism for a long time and it needs to come to an end. RAM just like SSDs and HDDs ought to have some amount of self protection against basic errors, all places where data is stored even for short periods needs this.
What's really annoying is that the current generation of Intel CPUs support ECC, they just don't implement it in consumer chipsets. You can get working ECC with a W680 motherboard, but those are very expensive and availability is slim.
AMD ryzen CPUs have ECC support, but it varies by motherboard. My home NAS runs a Ryzen in an ASrock Rack motherboard with ECC ram.
I never did figure out a way to verify that the ECC is working/if it is able to report errors (to the kernel?). It was also a bit hard finding the right ram, but there’s a brand called Nemix that I found. I was a bit sketched out by the brand, but the chips themselves were Micron.
AMD used to not segment ECC for non-consuner lines. It wasn't very popular with consumers. So I can't really blame them for not supporting it well. One way that is a good balance is to make it work but not officially supported on consumer lines. Then it's up to mb vendors and buyers to take advantage if worthwhile to them. That's enough to not cut into non-consuner lines or add support costs to consumer pricing.
One thing that could change this quick is if Apple used ECC. Others would follow to not seem inferior. I don't hear Apple users complain much at all about lack of ECC options.
I wasn't aware. Did some searching around and it mostly concerns the Mac Pro/Studio products in discussions. I was thinking more along the lines of regular MacBook Pros and such. Using ECC in products priced much higher doesn't change things elsewhere.
Not all of them, afaik the am4 processors with graphics don't unless you have a pro branded version.
> I never did figure out a way to verify that the ECC is working/if it is able to report errors (to the kernel?
The easiest way is to induce an error. Some of the memtest tools try? But also, you can tweak memory voltage and timing to make things less reliable, and you should be able to get errors and error reporting as a result.
I think the question is where are the errors reported? Would you see logs in dmesg for example? Or is there some smartctl-like tool that exposes the raw correction counters?
I was looking into getting a motherboard for a consumer CPU with ECC support several months ago. The fact that AMD and the motherboard manufactures don't explicitly say they support ECC is the reason I went with a Intel Supermicro motherboard that did explicitly say it supports ECC. I agree with the article though that it's crazy I have to resort to a workstation/server motherboard to be certain I'm getting ECC.
To see if ECC is working try overclocking the RAM if possible and looking for EDAC errors (they'll show up in dmesg) or from running edac-util. Eventually you should see something reported.
I suspect that other methods of CPU segmentation, i.e. RAM channels, and PCIe lane are artificial in a similar way, i.e. cost of producing a die for a CPU is more or less the same, but pro CPUs have more of them.
