I came back, and after a long day of searching the Internet, all I can say was that the situation was worse than I thought, only a few mobile workstations on the older Xeon platform supported ECC memory, and almost all products with Ryzen Pro APUs used soldered memory or made the motherboard/BIOS not support ECC memory.
Support for replaceable ECC SODIMM will appeal to laptop users who require ECC for a high level of reliability.
(I don’t know, but I think there are not a few people with such needs,may attract more potential customers)
Given that they’re now on batch 12 of FWL16, it doesn’t seem like attracting even more customers is the problem at the moment. Getting product out the door fast enough to meet demand comes first.
I can understand the priorities of the official team, I have heard NRP talk about the problems that your team is facing, just write my position and opinion here, but the moderator is more active than I thought.
Shutting this down folks as it’s just going down a deep, dark rabbit hole that is unnecessary. This is what happens when you live on the bleeding edge and are working on delivering products in tandem with developers/manufacturers while they are still deep into development. AMD hadn’t even announced their new line of APUs when we started working on integrating the new tech into our mainboards and they were still very much a work-in-progress. As you can tell by the conflicting information on the Internet, things evolved and changed on every side.
There are no plans to add Pro-series APUs to the lineup this generation, and as we’ve said previously, multiple times, official support for ECC functionality will not exist on this release.
There’s no point is debating or arguing this, as it is fact, and having our volunteer Moderators or even myself constanting jumping into threads to say the same thing is unnecessary. If official ECC support is a dealbreaker for you, while we’d love to welcome you to the Framework Family now, perhaps this generation is not for you, and that’s okay. We’re not going anywhere and hopefully we’ll be able to meet your expectations in the future.
My opinion is this, logically thinking about it:
If you need ECC…then isn’t it very likely that you don’t want to bank it on 1st revision products? (Be it Apple, HP, Lenovo…etc)
And again, Framework released a list of compatible RAM for the 13" Laptop AMD boards:
I suppose it will apply to the 16" model.
It is stated that: DDR5 modules have on-die ECC support and ECC modules will allow the system to function, however, ECC parity functionality is not supported by the non-Pro series APUs that Framework offers.
I blame Intel for starting the trend of using ECC as a enterprise feature to milk more money. Most cpu dies from Intel and amd have the hardware to fully support ECC, they just have it disabled.
It is absolutely disgraceful that we are still using non ECC RAM. That should be a thing of the past.
AMD updated their spec sheets on the 7040 non-PRO U processors and marked ECC as “No”. SolidRun still advertises ECC for U processors.
The page for the 6800U for example did not (yet) change but maybe no one pestered AMD with this and I do not know of actual working ECC with that processor.
I have good hopes for my Kingston 5600MT ECC at least working fine without parity since the 4800MT version seems to be. So here is to having ECC support sometime down the line (be it in a FW mainboard or whatever DDR5 SO-DIMM hardware):
Wow they actually did! Presumably AMD decided that’s gonna be a nice artificial market segmentation for their Pro CPU line. Given AMD’s track record on the desktop I really thought they would not do the same shenanigans als Intel.
Imagine if you relied on that spec sheet that’s been online for months. Who will still trust AMD’s product pages?
To quote Louis Rossmann: Informative and unfortunate.
PS: My thanks goes to the Framework team. All things considered you were really transparent about current state of ECC support in your products as more details became available.
You will also find failures on other websites.
I’ve seen mainboards with misnamed connectors, Intel CPUs with wrong features (even “basic stuff” like HyperThreading yes/no), misleading numbering of hard drive slots in desktop cases, accessories which are not delivered with every unit, concerts beginning at the wrong time,…
In big companies not every required information finds it ways to every department. Even more if the final product is still in progress.
To be fair, all non-PRO desktop-APUs (at least) since Zen did not support ECC. The PRO SKUs did, but were essentially unobtanium since they were only sold to OEMs. So if the mobile non-PRO APUs do not support ECC that is at least consistent. Even so it is a bit disappointing since the hardware does not seem to differ on the PRO/non-PRO APUs.
I wonder how big the cost difference is between those SKUs. I would have paid extra for ECC support, especially when it is official.
I do however know that for the vast majority ECC isn’t even a consideration so having either everybody paying more or having to maintain a separate SKU is probably not sustainable.
If there are several hundred $ between the framework SKUs maybe having the high end one using a PRO CPU would be an alternative. That way there would be the same number of SKUs to maintain, higher price for PRO only hits the enthusiasts shelling out for the high end anyway and there are some other benefits like RAM encryption (SME) as well.
At least some of the non-PRO Zen SKUs supported ECC. My non-PRO Threadripper 2950X (a Zen 1+ CPU) and its motherboard (a MSI consumer board) both support ECC. On/off switch in the BIOS IIRC. I have 4x32GB of ECC in it right now for working with large databases, VMs, and containers.
What about cost? I think the average user doing gaming, office work, or creative work doesn’t really care about ECC or benefit from it. Having more segmentation allows people to choose between features and price. From the perspective of AMD or Intel, if you care about ECC, you’re most likely a professional that can afford to fork out a lot of money for it.
For a lot of consumer chips, cost versus performance is a big factor in purchasing decisions. Additional features that add cost but are unutilized can really skew that equation.
It would cost them nothing to leave support enabled in their CPUs. Having ECC support doesn’t necessarily force you to buy ECC ram that may be more expensive.
Yes, I use it too on my 3700X and set it up working on Threadripper 1920X and Ryzen 5800X. But you need to differentiate between APU (monolithic with iGPU) and CPU (chiplets and until Ryzen 7000 no GPU). APUs generally didn’t support ECC outside of PRO-SKUs.
Didn’t think about Threadripper having PRO-SKUs while there the differentiation is not ECC but other features.
They may not realize they benefit from it or the benefit might be marginal but more stability or data integrity is always a good thing. They may not care enough to pay more for it but they would benefit, however slight or marginal.
