The sad thing is that I have seen signs of AMD starting to do the same. When I was shopping for a motherboard lately, I've begun seen motherboard manuals that state "ECC is only supported with PRO CPUs."
As far as i know this is only true for APUs. Cpus without a gpu don't have this limitation. Also most mobo manufacturers don't seem to emphasise any ECC features as there are no RGB lights on any of the available DIMMs I assume.
ECC DRAM support is physically present in the chip, and will work if the motherboard supports it, but it's _up_ to the motherboard to support it.
Some Ryzen motherboards are marketed explicitly as having ECC DRAM support (e.g., ASRock Rack X470D4U, ASUS Pro WS X570-ACE).
Other Ryzen motherboards have ECC DRAM support, but they don't advertise it as a feature for one reason or another (most of ASRock's motherboard lineup, many mid-range ASUS motherboards, possibly others).
Still others completely lack ECC support (many low-end boards, as well as high-end gaming-focused boards).
> what does enabled but not validated mean?
Basically, it means that it's optional. As described above, ECC can work or not work depending on which specific motherboard you get, and it's up to the system integrator to choose a motherboard compatible with ECC if that's a desired feature.
That's as opposed to "validated" ECC support in, say, AMD's Threadripper platform. In that case, if a company builds and markets a motherboard as compatible with Threadripper, and it lacks ECC support, they can expect to receive a nasty letter from AMD's legal team.
> That's as opposed to "validated" ECC support in, say, AMD's Threadripper platform. In that case, if a company builds and markets a motherboard as compatible with Threadripper, and it lacks ECC support, they can expect to receive a nasty letter from AMD's legal team.
Are you sure about that? I'm only asking because the System76 Threadripper Thelio[0] doesn't support ECC (according to the response I received from their support people). Their response was actually that "Threadripper and our motherboard do not offer ECC" (TR obviously does support it though), but is it the case that they're actually contractually obligated to support ECC?
> I'm only asking because the System76 Threadripper Thelio[0] doesn't support ECC
The Thelio Major uses a Gigabyte X399 Designare EX motherboard, which has ECC DRAM support. System76 may not offer or support ECC DRAM as an option, but you can add it yourself if you're so inclined.
I'm running ECC memory on my R1700X... I'm fairly sure TR also has ECC memory. In fact, all of AMDs offerings except for APUs have ECC enabled, but AMD does not force motherboard manufacturers to implement it.
I think taht Picasso is actually an APU (CPU+graphics) and before Ryzen/Zen they never supported ECC. So, I think that ECC is for PRO APUs is an improvement.
Incorrect; there were a bunch of AM3(+) boards which advertised ECC support back in the day. The IMC of AMD's desktop processors always supported ECC if I'm not mistaken.
I guess it depends on what "supported" means in the context of the mobo. I'm always afraid its going to mean that I cannot enable scrubbing, etc, if the cpu is not "supported"
Same goes for memory and virtualization encryption.
They should be standard consumer features. SEM "sort of" is, but I believe it's not enabled by default on many BIOSes, and SEV is reserved to Epyc. In a time that even Windows 10 has Windows Sandbox and Edge App Guard as consumer-centric virtualization features, supporting virtualization encryption is starting to make more sense. And of course there are all the "pro" people that were already playing with VMs on their machines.
Granted, SEV seems kind of broken/insecure, but I'd still like to see an improvement version coming to consumer Ryzen within the next-generation or two. It coming to Zen 3 chips would probably be ideal, because I don't think AMD will be able to show yet another impressive increase in performance with them, as they will remain on a 7nm process, and Zen 3 itself is supposed to be more of an iteration to Zen 2 anyway. This way at least they can lure people with "more security features", as well as other features like AV1 hardware decoding/encoding support.