Well, at least Intel acknowledges, documents and finally fixes these CPU bugs (via microcode updates).
AMD on the other hand doesn't even acknowledge an issue
when multiple customers report problems. See this Ryzen bug:
https://community.amd.com/thread/215773
Huh? There are plenty of AMD employees in that thread who have acknowledged the problem. They're "looking into it", but just seem to have no progress to report yet, and suck at keeping people in the loop.
"Apparently, Intel had indeed found the issue,documented it (see below) and fixed it. There was no direct feedback to the OCaml people, so they only found about it later."
It was acknowledged, and documented in a errata bulletin, but not communicated back to the reporter. Assuming that it had not already been reported, discovered internally, or reported by another source. Seems more like sloppy followup on a bug report, which unfortunately happens in any large project.
I think yours has stretched the image vertically, though it is simpler than the one linked in the article [1]. That uses "Upper Half Block" characters to give square pixels, and sets a foreground and background colour -- doing two rows at once.
Thanks for pointing this out. I found this on the specification page[0] for the ASRock "X370 Killer SLI/ac" AM4 board:
> AMD Ryzen series CPUs support DDR4 2667/2400/2133 ECC & non-ECC, un-buffered memory
So the board seems to accept ECC memory, hopefully that means the memory controller actually performs ECC? I found a reddit comment claiming that the boards accept ECC memory but don't perform error correction[1]. Not a great source but seemingly possible.
Do you have any more sources suggesting that ECC is actually being implemented?
For example, BIOSs often have ECC settings, if we had some screenshots of an AM4 board bios showing ECC setting that would be strong evidence.
That's good information but still doesn't tell us that these cpus support ECC, right? Maybe the motherboard fully supports ECC when used with a future 1800X-PRO but not with the 3 chips reviewed here.
In that case anandtech saying "We know that it is disabled for the consumer parts" and ASRock saying "ASRock AM4 motherboards fully support ECC function" can both be true.
AMD will use the same die for its server CPUs, so ECC support is on chip anyway. I see no reason why they should turn it off in the Ryzen CPUs launched today.
The IMC in almost any Intel CPU also could do ECC, but on most consumer SKUs there's that pesky little configuration flag set by the factory telling it not to. Why? Because Intel can, that's why.
Gigabyte mobos say you can use ecc memory but not run them in ecc mode.
"Support for ECC Un-buffered DIMM 1Rx8/2Rx8 memory modules (operate in non-ECC mode)"
> So the board seems to accept ECC memory, hopefully that means the memory controller actually performs ECC? I found a reddit comment claiming that the boards accept ECC memory but don't perform error correction[1].
This is set up by the firmware (BIOS). Since we all already know that quite some of these still have issues (unsurprisingly, it's a new platform), it isn't far-fetched at all that current firmware doesn't quite do the right thing with certain memory sticks.
Note that this is unbuffered, unregistered ECC memory, which is usually more expensive and less available than the standard server memory (DDR3R / DDR4R), which is NOT compatible with any consumer CPUs.
FWIW, I remember ASRock being mistaken about AMD features in the past: iirc there was a while when they were wrongly asserting that Bulldozer didn't support I/O virtualisation. (Eventually they implemented it on their own AM3 motherboards.)
IIRC just because it boots with ECC ram doesn't mean it is actually error correcting. I'm under the impression Intel spends considerable amount of money to prove their memory controllers actually error correct & historically AMD hasn't spent the money on documenting theirs.
Is that buffered ECC or unbuffured ECC? Because last time I checked, my AM3 board had support only for unbuffured, which is really hard to find and I just didn't bother.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, your comment is accurate. Consumer hardware traditionally does not support registered memory, which is (reg ECC) the standard for server hardware hence cheap, while unbuf, unreg ECC is rather rare. AM4/Zen is no exception, no DDR4R for consumers.
