Intel CPUs Don’t Support ECC Memory: How Bad For A/V Quality?

[Miska]

On 1/15/2021 at 7:28 PM, jcbenten said:

AMD is leaving it up to the MB makers to support.  Support is just not using...it also entails aftermarket issues.  Implement at your own risk.

 

I think AMD EPYC CPU's have always supported ECC. And have also things like memory encryption. Threadripper versions also gained support for the memory encryption part.

 

[Miska]

7 hours ago, John Dyson said:

Intel Xeon also always supports ECC, that is part of the market differentiation.   I'd rather have ECC, but it is all in the mix of tradeoffs.   If I had more than 64G, I'd almost definitely go for ECC, because the stats get worse.   At 256G, there is no question.   I only have 32G -- so raw memory is reliable enough for me.   I have a  10900X processor, and if I had to tradeoff with a 6core processor with ECC -- I'd take the 10900X.   One item of note -- I have an application that easily takes all 10 cores, not all people are pushing things so hard.   Frankly, Id even prefer a 16 or 18 core machine.

 

In addition, Xeons support much larger RAM installations and have double the number of memory channels compared to regular desktop CPU models (except some X-series and such CPUs).

 

My previous development workstation was Xeon E5 with 32 GB of ECC RAM and it supported up to 768 GB of RAM.

 

My current development workstation has Xeon W-2245 with 64 GB of ECC RAM and it supports up to 1 TB of RAM. In addition, it has AVX-512 support which has been lacking from the regular desktop CPUs.

 

[Miska]

50 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

My X processor has AVX512 also -- but when I run the DHNRDS on it, using a well ported AVX512 version versus the well ported AVX2 makes little difference in performance.  In fact, the current generations of CPUS slow down when using AVX 512.    I have been thinking about doing tests where using the AVX512 instruction set ONLY for the long FIR filters and Hilbert transforms, but I'd suspect that the slowdown when using AVX512 would persist long enough to also slow down when running AVX2 instrs.  (the reason for using AVX512 for some of the FIR filters is that 512bits at a time might help a little.)

 

For me W-2245 can do about the same with lower clocks and AVX-512 as i9-9900KS can do running all-core 5 GHz and AVX2. Plus I win a lot of memory bandwidth and PCIe lanes, and ECC support.

 

53 minutes ago, John Dyson said:

Also, if you really do not need AVX512 and dont need more than 10 cores, I'd suggest the 10900K for the 10th generation, or wait for the 11th generation. (Or, try AMD.)

 

Of recent CPU's I have 9900KS and 10900K as well. And now AMD's 5800X. But the AMD is not quite as good on modulator workloads.

 

OTOH, all my workloads are realtime processing. And full saturation would mean drop-outs, and on most CPUs (apart from 9900KS) it also means that you are not getting benefit from turbo. And turbo is essential to get high enough clocks.

 

[Miska]

6 hours ago, StreamFidelity said:

Intel® Xeon® W-2245 Processor
- Processor Base Frequency 3.90 GHz
- Max Turbo Frequency 4.50 GHz

 

As far as I know, the AVX 512 CPU drops back to the base clock. Is that enough for the modulator ASDM7EC with DSD 256?

 

Yes, I think it does it because of TDP limit. But yes, ASDM7EC works fine with it, with about 90% core load on the modulator cores. I offload filters to the RTX 2080 GPU, but running also filters on the CPU works fine. But offloading the filters leaves plenty of CPU time for running compilers and other development stuff.

 

[Miska]

17 hours ago, John Dyson said:

X looks like K, almost.

The tradeoff of X vs K is X has more cache per core, AVX512, but K has a slightly faster clock rate on average and has slightly higher temp limit.

 

X has twice as many memory channels giving twice the memory bandwidth (and max capacity). X also has much more PCIe lanes.

 

[Miska]

I see benefit in more memory channels and faster memory. And also in low CL memory...

 

For some algorithms GPUs still do even better job with their 512-bit or similar very high bandwidth memory and lot of processing units. This is also where PCIe lanes become handy.