Also, ECC ram is technically supported on AMD’s recent consumer platform, although it’s not advertised as so since they don’t do validation testing for it.
I've read that reporting of ECC events is not supported on consumer Ryzen. It's not a complete solution and since unregistered ECC is being used, how can you even be sure the memory controller is doing any error correction at all?
Someone would need to induce memory errors and publish their results. I'd love to read it.
This is 4 years old now, but does produce some interesting results.
The author of that article doesn't have hands-on experience with ECC DRAM, and mistakenly concludes that ECC on Ryzen is unreliable because of a misunderstanding of how Linux behaves when it encounters an uncorrected error. However, the author at least includes screenshots which show ECC functionality on Ryzen working properly.
> ...since unregistered ECC is being used, how can you even be sure the memory controller is doing any error correction at all?
ECC is performed by the memory controller, and requires an extra memory device per rank and 8 extra data bits, which unbuffered ECC DIMMs provide.
Registered memory has nothing to do with ECC (although in practice, registered DIMMs almost always have ECC support). It's simply a mechanism to reduce electrical load on the memory controller to allow for the usage of higher-capacity DIMMs than what unbuffered DIMMs would allow.
With respect to Ryzen, Zen's memory controller architecture is unified, and owners of Ryzen CPUs use the same memory controller found in similar-generation Threadripper and EPYC processors (just fewer of them). Although full ECC support is not required on the AM4 platform specifically (it's an optional feature that can be implemented by the motherboard maker), it's functional and supported if present. Indeed, there are several Ryzen motherboards aimed at professional audiences where ECC is an explicitly advertised feature of the board.
ECC reporting is part of the memory controller (which is unified across all Zen architecture parts), and is fully supported and functional. You can see the reporting working as expected within the Hardware Canucks article linked in the grand parent.
The article you linked mentions that ECC reporting is not working with the on-board IPMI controller (which presumably means that ECC events aren't being logged in the SEL). While that might be a limitation of this board (and other IPMI-equipped AM4 boards), reporting from within the operating system will still work.
