[vegabook]

Who needs a Xeon now? The only chink in the armour here is the 64GB max, which admittedly is bad for the science/Machine learning folks, but the vast majority of these chips is used for databases, web serving, app serving, etc, for which these ECC-enabled Ryzens are a game changer on price. Cluster them up on premises or in cloud, and you're looking at a total winner, especially that the 16GB dimms are still much cheaper than the 32s so you'll be able to create very decent servers on the cheap.

[8draco8]

ECC support in CPU is just a half of success. Now somebody have to convince motherboard manufacturers to enable it. It was the same thing with previous AMD CPUs. They all had ECC support but there was virtually no motherboards that would support it.

[drewg123]

Yes, I still remember what a PITA it was to identify a motherboard that both supported ECC and allowed enabling it in the BIOS for my last AMD build (circa 2007). I still remember reading about boards that offered "ECC support", but had no way to enable it in the BIOS, change the scrubbing time, etc. And how relieved I was that whatever I wound up with did indeed have full ECC support.

Then again, buying Xeon boards with ECC support for desktop use has been "fun" as well, but for the opposite reason. I actually had to go with a USB sound card when I built my wife's e3 xeon setup.

[agapon]

Asus was the most forth-coming about that. If they mentioned ECC support on a motherboard's specifications page, then it supported ECC and it couldbe enabled, etc. If they didn't, then there was no ECC support. Other manufacturers were far less informative about that. Maybe because it was rare for them to support ECC. E.g. I think that none of Gigabyte AMD motherboards had ECC.

[jlgaddis]

There are plenty of SuperMicro desktop boards that include sound (and support ECC).

[drewg123]

Yes, I'm typing this from one (X10SRA) now. But there was some drawback to getting sound in ~2011. And even when I built this one, I wasn't really happy with the selection.

A poor selection and higher prices is a consequence of fragmenting the market and making workstations with ECC a fairly rare thing.

[vegabook]

these are the specs on an ASUS motherboard.

[drewg123]

The 64GB limit you quote appears on one vendor's motherboard spec sheet. Given that this board also supports older generation CPUS, perhaps this limit is a limit of the motherboard, and not the Ryzen CPU itself?

Do we know anything more about what Ryzen supports in terms of memory? Eg, number of memory channels, speed, etc?

[sp332]

It is a limitation of the chip because it only has two memory channels. http://pcworld.com/article/3149118/computers/what-we-know-ab...