Oh, I see what you are saying. About how Windows will handle an error. In AT's memtest run the test triggered a stop interrupt presumably as it didn't know how to handle the error. I see what you are getting at with Windows.
This is sold as an industrial mini-PC. For something like that, reliability is key. Memory errors are one potential source of reliability problems, and ECC is an effective measure to compensate (short-term) and flag for replacement (long-term) any defective memory modules or boards.
The lore behind ECC is that it protects against cosmic rays, but I've only personally seen ECC errors that seem tied to flaky or failing hardware. It's worthwhile even for that purpose, alone.
It needs to be noted that SECDED over 512 bit is FAR less powerfull in handling errors than SECDED over 64-bit like regular ECC (or SECDED over 32-bit using DDR5 ECC sticks). They could have instead emulated the SECDED over each 64-bit chunk but then the extra reserved memory would have needed to be 8GB instead of 2GB, and the performance penalty likely would have been sigificantly worse. SECDED means it's guaranteed to correct one incorrect bit (SEC) and detect two incorrect bits (DED), no warranties for what happen with more incorrect bits but there's a decent statistical chance it'll detect them (but no chance it'll fix them). Obviously getting two or even three+ faulty bits in the same "group" is far more likely over 512-bit compared to 64-bit, in fact it's my understanding that it'll likely happen most of the time given how memory sticks are constructed! It's still useful because it'll detect a certain percentage of the multi-bit error so you will often? get told that you that you have faulty memory (except this doesn't seem to work) before things crash which means you know you need to fix the hardware, but the "correct bits" part is unlikely to save you because at least some of the time it'll get multiple wrong bits in the burst. I suspect they would have been better of with just giving up on correcting and aiming for "detect as many bit errors as we can" (probably 3-4 guaranteed bit detected with the 16-bit of extra data per 512bit they choose). It's definitely better than no ECC *if* the software support gets improved a bit, but is in no way comparable to "real" ECC. OTOH, it's not priced as that either but it needs to be pointed out because some people will sell it as if it is.
Taken standalone, you arguments are completely sound.
However, in the bigger picture, you should note that newer memory technologies include link ECC to protect the high-speed communication link between the SoC and the external memory, AND, the DRAM DIMMs themselves implement transparent ECC for the stored data.
Overall, even mission-critical requirements like ASIL / ISO26262 (for automotive safety) can be met with the requisite FIT (failure-in-time) rate using SECDED protection for 512-bit blocks *assuming those other protection mechanisms are also in place*.
In-band ECC is also used on Tegra for such embedded applications [ https://twitter.com/never_released/status/13559704... ; I can't seem to dig up the original documentation, but remember this was heavily discussed when the Tegra feature was made public ].
> you should note that newer memory technologies include link ECC to protect the high-speed communication link between the SoC and the external memory
Are you saying the system you reviewed also supports traditional out-of-band ECC? Why wasn't that mentioned in the review? If not, then your point would seem to be moot.
I also don't see the point of using in-band ECC atop OOB ECC. Anything that OOB ECC can't correct doesn't seem like it's going to be correctable by in-band ECC.
Given that ECC error reports are extremely rare on our systems (with typically 128GB of RAM), I don't worry about having more than one error in 512 bits. Even when a DIMM failed, it resulted in 19 ECC errors (18 uncorrectable) in 14 hours, probably noticed by scrubbing (regular walks through memory to detect whether a bit has flipped).
Yes, the target page will get updated with the additional new model once Newegg is ready to sell them (as per the info I have from ASRock Industrial). If the URL changes, I will update it. For now, the system has just started entering the channel and is not available for end-user purchase yet.
I would love to see some video tests at non-standard resolutions like "5K" (5120x2160). I have a couple of kiosks that run weird display resolutions and would love to use a NUC to power them, but with the official specs only going up to 4K I've not wanted to risk it not working.
Well, it stands to reason that the in-band ECC option would be physically available on all recent SoCs, because nobody can resist maximizing cut & paste IP blocks.
But with Intel NUCs, there is literally no chance whatsoever they'd support that on non-industrial SKUs, because it's a chance to charge double.
So I wonder if they won't force OEMs to disable that 'rogue' feature, much like AES512 or some of the recent BLK overclocking gimmicks.
I don't even mind paying an ECC premium on hardware I run 24x7, because in those cases compromised data would cost much more. But you can't buy "ECC-variants" of common NUCs and recently even buying ECC variant mainboards of classical desktop chipsets e.g. W680 has become next to impossible, when that was relatively easy say in Haswell times.
Don't know if it's because it's too niche or if Intel is somehow actively discouraging that market. AMD came to rescue until it went with DDR5, where ECC variants were "unobtainium".
All I can say is that I'd be happy to throw €100 at the ability to activate in-band ECC for any SoC that phyiscally supports it, even in a notebook that might get recycled as a server after it's no longer fit for the roadtrips.
W680 boards are available in Germany and Austria, but they are expensive (>EUR 440).
DDR5 UDIMMs with ECC are available in Germany and Austria from Kingston at ~EUR 210 for a 32GB UDIMM. Note that unlike for AM4, Asrock apparently no longer supports ECC with AM5, currently leaving ASUS as only supplyer for those of us who want ECC. At least AMD officially supports ECC in all socketed Ryzen 7000 CPUs up to now.
I also don't agree that W680 boards are scarce. At least Supermicro boards seemed to be easy enough to find since the end of last year. Now DDR5 ECC UDIMMs have been a much bigger challenge, but they're thankfully now readily available too.
Thanks for the review, but my ideal microserver would be fanless and support a 2.5" SATA SSD. Does anyone know if any of their fanless boxes support in-band ECC? I couldn't find any indication that they do.
ASRock Industrial took notice of your comment and requested that this be posted in response.
ASRock Industrial technical support team appreciate your attention on our product.
ASRock Industrial will use Intel 13Gen. IoTG SKUs CPU on the iBOX-series products. It will design as a fanless system with 2.5" SATA SSD support. For In-Band ECC feature, please note that Intel support it on select Industrial SKUs according to Intel’s official documents. We suggest to keep following ASRock Industrial’s website for more and latest news.
Now, if I could just find an ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T Mini-ATX board in stock somewhere in the US. I can never seem to find it or the newer /BCM version.
Just wanted to follow up on the ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T. It's finally back in stock @ newegg! Shipped & sold by newegg, too (i.e. not just some scalper).
For those not familiar with this product, it's a micro-ATX AM4 server board with dual 10G Ethernet, ECC RAM support, and remote management via BMC. I'm excited, because there are no other products like it, to my knowledge. ASRock Rack has validated ECC memory on it, which you tend to see on other AM4 boards. You can find professional reviews of it, on other sites.
Sorry, I meant to say that I _haven't_ seen ECC memory fully validated and supported, on other AM4 boards. This is one of the preferred boards of the homebrew NAS community.
Silly people posting on ECC for a end user desktop/kiosk device - trying to put a square peg in a round hole. I like the idealistic attitude. But the realistic says otherwise.
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drajitshnew - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
The in band ECC is an absolutely brilliant idea for systems with 64 GB or more. It is unfortunate that windows does not support it.Samus - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
My understanding is this doesn't need support at the software level. This is still "hardware ECC" and OS-independent.Samus - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
Oh, I see what you are saying. About how Windows will handle an error. In AT's memtest run the test triggered a stop interrupt presumably as it didn't know how to handle the error. I see what you are getting at with Windows.bernstein - Monday, January 30, 2023 - link
it's more likely, that chrome mandates ecc support, while with windows intel pushes ecc as $$$ feature[email protected] - Monday, February 13, 2023 - link
This competes with laptops. Please expand on why ECC is coming up?mode_13h - Tuesday, February 14, 2023 - link
> Please expand on why ECC is coming up?This is sold as an industrial mini-PC. For something like that, reliability is key. Memory errors are one potential source of reliability problems, and ECC is an effective measure to compensate (short-term) and flag for replacement (long-term) any defective memory modules or boards.
The lore behind ECC is that it protects against cosmic rays, but I've only personally seen ECC errors that seem tied to flaky or failing hardware. It's worthwhile even for that purpose, alone.
TLindgren - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
It needs to be noted that SECDED over 512 bit is FAR less powerfull in handling errors than SECDED over 64-bit like regular ECC (or SECDED over 32-bit using DDR5 ECC sticks). They could have instead emulated the SECDED over each 64-bit chunk but then the extra reserved memory would have needed to be 8GB instead of 2GB, and the performance penalty likely would have been sigificantly worse.SECDED means it's guaranteed to correct one incorrect bit (SEC) and detect two incorrect bits (DED), no warranties for what happen with more incorrect bits but there's a decent statistical chance it'll detect them (but no chance it'll fix them).
Obviously getting two or even three+ faulty bits in the same "group" is far more likely over 512-bit compared to 64-bit, in fact it's my understanding that it'll likely happen most of the time given how memory sticks are constructed!
It's still useful because it'll detect a certain percentage of the multi-bit error so you will often? get told that you that you have faulty memory (except this doesn't seem to work) before things crash which means you know you need to fix the hardware, but the "correct bits" part is unlikely to save you because at least some of the time it'll get multiple wrong bits in the burst. I suspect they would have been better of with just giving up on correcting and aiming for "detect as many bit errors as we can" (probably 3-4 guaranteed bit detected with the 16-bit of extra data per 512bit they choose).
It's definitely better than no ECC *if* the software support gets improved a bit, but is in no way comparable to "real" ECC. OTOH, it's not priced as that either but it needs to be pointed out because some people will sell it as if it is.
ganeshts - Monday, January 30, 2023 - link
Taken standalone, you arguments are completely sound.However, in the bigger picture, you should note that newer memory technologies include link ECC to protect the high-speed communication link between the SoC and the external memory, AND, the DRAM DIMMs themselves implement transparent ECC for the stored data.
Overall, even mission-critical requirements like ASIL / ISO26262 (for automotive safety) can be met with the requisite FIT (failure-in-time) rate using SECDED protection for 512-bit blocks *assuming those other protection mechanisms are also in place*.
In-band ECC is also used on Tegra for such embedded applications [ https://twitter.com/never_released/status/13559704... ; I can't seem to dig up the original documentation, but remember this was heavily discussed when the Tegra feature was made public ].
ganeshts - Monday, January 30, 2023 - link
(Correction: DRAM DIMMs -> The memory chips)mode_13h - Tuesday, February 14, 2023 - link
> you should note that newer memory technologies include link ECC to protect the high-speed communication link between the SoC and the external memoryAre you saying the system you reviewed also supports traditional out-of-band ECC? Why wasn't that mentioned in the review? If not, then your point would seem to be moot.
I also don't see the point of using in-band ECC atop OOB ECC. Anything that OOB ECC can't correct doesn't seem like it's going to be correctable by in-band ECC.
AntonErtl - Saturday, February 4, 2023 - link
Given that ECC error reports are extremely rare on our systems (with typically 128GB of RAM), I don't worry about having more than one error in 512 bits. Even when a DIMM failed, it resulted in 19 ECC errors (18 uncorrectable) in 14 hours, probably noticed by scrubbing (regular walks through memory to detect whether a bit has flipped).HideOut - Sunday, January 29, 2023 - link
You linked the wrong item for barebones. You linked the old model.ganeshts - Monday, January 30, 2023 - link
Yes, the target page will get updated with the additional new model once Newegg is ready to sell them (as per the info I have from ASRock Industrial). If the URL changes, I will update it. For now, the system has just started entering the channel and is not available for end-user purchase yet.GhostOfAnand - Monday, January 30, 2023 - link
Good work, G-man. I liked the expose on this in-band ECC business. Discussion here: https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=2104...notR1CH - Tuesday, January 31, 2023 - link
I would love to see some video tests at non-standard resolutions like "5K" (5120x2160). I have a couple of kiosks that run weird display resolutions and would love to use a NUC to power them, but with the official specs only going up to 4K I've not wanted to risk it not working.abufrejoval - Saturday, February 4, 2023 - link
Well, it stands to reason that the in-band ECC option would be physically available on all recent SoCs, because nobody can resist maximizing cut & paste IP blocks.But with Intel NUCs, there is literally no chance whatsoever they'd support that on non-industrial SKUs, because it's a chance to charge double.
So I wonder if they won't force OEMs to disable that 'rogue' feature, much like AES512 or some of the recent BLK overclocking gimmicks.
I don't even mind paying an ECC premium on hardware I run 24x7, because in those cases compromised data would cost much more. But you can't buy "ECC-variants" of common NUCs and recently even buying ECC variant mainboards of classical desktop chipsets e.g. W680 has become next to impossible, when that was relatively easy say in Haswell times.
Don't know if it's because it's too niche or if Intel is somehow actively discouraging that market. AMD came to rescue until it went with DDR5, where ECC variants were "unobtainium".
All I can say is that I'd be happy to throw €100 at the ability to activate in-band ECC for any SoC that phyiscally supports it, even in a notebook that might get recycled as a server after it's no longer fit for the roadtrips.
AntonErtl - Saturday, February 4, 2023 - link
W680 boards are available in Germany and Austria, but they are expensive (>EUR 440).DDR5 UDIMMs with ECC are available in Germany and Austria from Kingston at ~EUR 210 for a 32GB UDIMM. Note that unlike for AM4, Asrock apparently no longer supports ECC with AM5, currently leaving ASUS as only supplyer for those of us who want ECC. At least AMD officially supports ECC in all socketed Ryzen 7000 CPUs up to now.
mode_13h - Tuesday, February 14, 2023 - link
> Asrock apparently no longer supports ECC with AM5Even ASRock Rack? They've announced AM5 boards, but I'm not sure if they're yet shipping.
AntonErtl - Wednesday, March 1, 2023 - link
There are no Asrock Rack AM5 boards listed on geizhals.at yet, so those may or may not support ECC when they become available.If this is an attempt by Asrock to get us to buy the more expensive Asrock Rack boards, it will fail: We will just buy ASUS.
mode_13h - Sunday, March 5, 2023 - link
BTW, the only ECC DDR5 UDIMMs I'm seeing are all DDR5-4800. I think it'll be a while before we see anything much faster.This could be a point in favor of in-band ECC, if only support for it would be more widespread.
mode_13h - Tuesday, February 14, 2023 - link
I also don't agree that W680 boards are scarce. At least Supermicro boards seemed to be easy enough to find since the end of last year. Now DDR5 ECC UDIMMs have been a much bigger challenge, but they're thankfully now readily available too.mode_13h - Tuesday, February 7, 2023 - link
Thanks for the review, but my ideal microserver would be fanless and support a 2.5" SATA SSD. Does anyone know if any of their fanless boxes support in-band ECC? I couldn't find any indication that they do.https://www.asrockind.com/en-gb/fanless-embedded-b...
ganeshts - Wednesday, February 8, 2023 - link
ASRock Industrial took notice of your comment and requested that this be posted in response.mode_13h - Thursday, February 9, 2023 - link
Thanks for the follow-up!Now, if I could just find an ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T Mini-ATX board in stock somewhere in the US. I can never seem to find it or the newer /BCM version.
mode_13h - Monday, February 27, 2023 - link
Just wanted to follow up on the ASRock Rack X570D4U-2L2T. It's finally back in stock @ newegg! Shipped & sold by newegg, too (i.e. not just some scalper).For those not familiar with this product, it's a micro-ATX AM4 server board with dual 10G Ethernet, ECC RAM support, and remote management via BMC. I'm excited, because there are no other products like it, to my knowledge. ASRock Rack has validated ECC memory on it, which you tend to see on other AM4 boards. You can find professional reviews of it, on other sites.
I'm about to order mine, now.
mode_13h - Monday, February 27, 2023 - link
Sorry, I meant to say that I _haven't_ seen ECC memory fully validated and supported, on other AM4 boards. This is one of the preferred boards of the homebrew NAS community.[email protected] - Monday, February 13, 2023 - link
Nice NUC. But I am waiting on the 7735U.[email protected] - Monday, February 13, 2023 - link
$690 barebones.[email protected] - Monday, February 13, 2023 - link
Silly people posting on ECC for a end user desktop/kiosk device - trying to put a square peg in a round hole. I like the idealistic attitude. But the realistic says otherwise.[email protected] - Tuesday, February 14, 2023 - link
Silly me! I retract. ECC support is a great idea.