AMD has the advantage with regards to ECC. Intel doesn't support ECC at all on consumer chips, you need to go Xeon. AMD supports it on all chips, but it is up to the motherboard vendor to (correctly) implement. You can get consumer-class AM4/5 boards that have ECC support.
There was a strange happening with AMD laptop CPUs (“APUs”): the non-soldered DDR5 variants of the 7x40’s were advertised to support ECC RAM on AMD’s website up until a couple months before any actual laptops were sold, then that was silently changed and ECC is only on the PRO models now. I still don’t know if this is a straightforward manufacturing or chipset issue of some kind or a sign of market segmentation to come.
(I’m quite salty I couldn’t get my Framework 13 with ECC RAM because of this.)
Unfortunately not. I can't say for current gen, but the 5000 series APUs like the 5600G do not support ECC. I know, I tried...
But yes, most Ryzen CPUs do have ECC functionality, and have had it since the 1000 series, even if not officially supported. Official support for ECC is only on Ryzen PRO parts.
https://youtu.be/RdYToqy05pI?t=503
I don't know how many times it has to be said but "doesn't explicitly disable" is not the same thing as "support". There are lots of other enablement steps that are required to get ECC to work properly, and they really need to be explicitly tested with each release (which if it is "not explicitly disabled", it's not getting tested). Support means you can complain to someone when it doesn't work right.
AMD churns AGESA really, really hard and it breaks all the time. Partners have to try and chase the upstream and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Elmor (Asus's Bios Guy) talked about this on Overclock.net back around 2017-2018 when AMD was launching X399 and talked about some of the troubles there and with AM4.
That said, the current situation has seemingly lit a fire under the board partners, with Intel out of commission and all these customers desperate for an alternative to their W680/raptor lake systems (which do support ecc officially, btw) in these performance-sensitive niches or power-limited datacenter layouts, they are finally cleaning up the mess like, within the last 3 weeks or so. They've very quickly gone from not caring about these boards to seeing a big market opportunity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1tXJ8HZcj4
can't believe how many times I've explained in the last month that yes, people do actually run 13700Ks in the datacenter... with ECC... and actually it's probably some pretty big names in fact. A previous video dropped the tidbit that one of the major affected customers is Citadel Capital - and yeah, those are the guys who used to get special EVEREST and BLACK OPS skus from intel for the same thing. Client platform is better at that, the very best sapphire rapids or epyc -F or -X3D sku is going to be like 75% of the performance at best. It's also the fastest thing available for serving NVMe flash storage (and Intel specifically targeted this, the Xeon E-2400 series with the C266 chipset can talk NVMe SAS natively on its chipset with up to 4 slimsas ports...)
it's somewhere in this one I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KHCLBqRrnY
