Raven Ridge With The Ryzen 5 2400G On Mesa 18.2 + Linux 4.17 Is Finally Stable

[starshipeleven]

Why exactly is ECC for an APU so important to you, to the point that you'd sell your 2400G? It's kind of the equivalent of putting premium gas in a cheap economy car.

I'd like to point out that this APU runs more or less the same as the non-APU Ryzen 5 1600 and is still a quadcore with hyperthreading like an i7, it's not a "cheap economy car", but squarely into midrange CPUs especially for multithreaded workloads. I only need some kind of integrated graphics, currently I'm perfectly fine with a HD4000 (Ivy Bridge from Intel) don't need that much graphics power as the APU can get me as I have a separate gaming system with a dedicated GPU, but it sure is nice.

That said it should be obvious. I want best possible data integrity, same reason I use btrfs (with safe and proven features, on the distro that is most likely to do it right, OpenSUSE, and I never had issues because of that).

Also, since RAM cost a ton anyway, there is no real reason to not get the best, the price difference is insignificant. Having ECC on consumer hardware is nice because I can actually find out pretty easily if the damn thing works, by just OCing the RAM until I start getting errors in the logs. Good luck trying to "validate ECC" on server hardware, and I don't give a shit about their certifications, I don't need a scapegoat I can blame if something goes wrong, I want the thing to actually work.

I was fully expecting to lose some money, but due to ebay being full of crazy, I lost only 30 euros as I resold it for a pretty decent price. The rest of the system I built is now running with a Ryzen 5 1600x and the rx570, so whatever, I did have a backup plan.

I could have done it far more cheaply with Intel, as they still offer lowish-end CPUs (i3, Pentiums at least) with ECC support, not to mention the 2-3 gen older used Xeons, but I prefer AMD because of all the small things. It is newer, it has a UEFI option to disable access to the PSP (which may or may not work, but is still not a total PITA like the ME_cleaner that still does not guarantee much more than that but requires hardware flashing to work at all, and I'm sick and tired of SPI flashing bullshit issues), isn't affected by Meltdown, but most importantly is a small minority of the overall CPU market, so the PSP is a far less likely target for malware than Intel's ME that is found in more than 80% of all hardware in the wild.

I would really like to get my hands on some program that can actually test the communication with the PSP though, so I can see if the UEFI option is actually working or not.

[Space Beer]

... but since it does not support ECC I've sold the Ryzen 5 2400G APU and I'm waiting for the PRO version that according to the motherboard manufacturers will support ECC.

bridgman any idea on when the PRO version might appear?

Raven Ridge has ECC support. It's the motherboard that might lack that

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/amd-ama-starts-at-12pm-est-on-wednesday-may-9.2545291/page-3#post-39418197

[dungeon]

Not so fast, cowboy. The chart seems wrong.

No, it is not wrong, i expected exactly this range in openarena pbench DDR4 is the same/similar, eDRAM is faster than average DDR4 (eDRAM behave somewhat like DDR4@3600Mhz but with lower timings too or to say like normal at 4000Mhz) and DDR3 is of course slower.
Remove one memory module, you will see about half speed. Put slowest dGPU just with GDDR5 and that will beat all of them. and so on...

Whole purpose of having that chunk of eDRAM is to be less bandwidth bound.

So it is normal to be slower there, only maybe DCC engine might help there on Ryzen APUs to be in range of Iris Pro's eDRAM, as that at least theoretically can save bandwidth by up to 30%.

[starshipeleven]

Raven Ridge has ECC support. It's the motherboard that might lack that
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads...#post-39418197

ECC support in the board firmware comes from the AGESA blob, which comes from AMD, and this I know for sure as I've seen discussions about this on the Coreboot mailing list (it was not about raven ridge but things didn't change). Unless AMD themselves enable it in the AGESA, the mobo firmware can't have it.

Which is why I think he might not know the whole picture, because I really doubt Asrock has decided to not support ECC on Raven ridge non-PRO APUs because of some money-grabbing scheme, as they don't make any money off people buying a PRO apu instead of whatever else, all their boards that support ECC have this limitation.
See the specification page for my mobo, where they eventually added the info (months after I did my test, but whatever, at least they did update their site) http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/Fatal1t...#Specification

Also Gigabyte mobos that state to support ECC like this https://www.gigabyte.com/uk/Motherbo...WIFI-rev-10#sp when tested in practice (seen on a german forum) don't have ECC working for current Raven Ridge APUs (which shows they are keeping their tradition of being a bag of dicks) while if someone mounts a Ryzen 5 1600x they enable ECC and it's all fine.

My current suspicion is that there were some issues with these APUs and ECC, and AMD engineers disabled ECC in the AGESA, while promising that it will be fixed by the time the PRO apus are out (which is quite a bit later than the non-PRO Raven Ridge), but this info didn't travel up to the AMD people talking in the forums, or they got orders to blame board manufacturers for PR reasons.
Or it is an Intel-like product segmentation trick, but this does not really make much sense, there isn't that much demand of APUs with ECC to justify that.

[dwagner]

according to the last message in the bug report those two patches should already be part of 4.17rc5.

Just looked and tested: Yes they are. Unluckily, besides being able to resume from S3 again, linux-4.17rc5 is crazy unstable with amdgpu.dc=1 on my system (Ryzen + RX460 GPU) - it literally crashed minutes after rebooting while trying to type this response. The older kernel I use suffers from those crashes "only" every few days (which is bad enough).

[wizard69]

Integrated GPU's don't have dedicated memory, they use RAM memory.

HBM memory could esily be integrated into an APU package and fully support both the GPU and the CPU. Rumors are strong that AMD is working on such a solution. You would then have to buy an 8GB or 16GB APU chip as i doubt external RAM would be supported.

RAM integrated into the SoC package will happen sooner or later. It is the only way left to significant GPU performance increases in APUs. Im actually wondering what is taking so long at AMD, such chips should be high priorities at AMD.

[wizard69]

…
Why exactly is ECC for an APU so important to you, to the point that you'd sell your 2400G? It's kind of the equivalent of putting premium gas in a cheap economy car.

i really found this comment to be surprising in this forum. Todays ApUs are very capable of performing in professional settings. As such RAM reliability could become a factor in purchasee.

There was a day when APU type chips where at best a joke and not for serious use. That is no longer the case

[wizard69]

Just looked and tested: Yes they are. Unluckily, besides being able to resume from S3 again, linux-4.17rc5 is crazy unstable with amdgpu.dc=1 on my system (Ryzen + RX460 GPU) - it literally crashed minutes after rebooting while trying to type this response. The older kernel I use suffers from those crashes "only" every few days (which is bad enough).

Well it is a release candidate. Not to be glib as ive been testing on my HP ENVY for some time various distros (havent decided yet but leaning towards Fedora) and nothing has yet proven stable enough for permanet intallation. I believe however that we are real close and probably woild be there if suspend wasnt so important.

[Duve]

Unfortunately no. I have no funds for any new hardware purchases and haven't been offered any Ryzen laptop review samples.

Darn, then I am to only guess that any APU improvements effects both platforms.

If you can find an APU laptop with dual-channel memory, I'm confident that would make for a decent buy. I'm not sure if current ones are Vega based, but they have good performance regardless. The tricky part is most of them are configured for single-channel memory. Considering how both Ryzen and Vega are starved for bandwidth, you should only consider dual-channel setups.

Given that power is a primary concern with any portable device, I doubt you would ever find a laptop that supports dual-channel setups that isn't in the high-end category. I like my games an all, but I have a budget to keep.

[schmidtbag]

i really found this comment to be surprising in this forum. Todays ApUs are very capable of performing in professional settings. As such RAM reliability could become a factor in purchasee.

Yes, they certainly are capable of professional settings, but being capable is only one of many factors to consider. Professional environments where data integrity is crucial is not the target demographic of these chips. Besides, not everything that is capable of a use is the best option. For example, a Ferrari is [theoretically] capable of towing a boat, due to the sturdy frame, lots of power, and good brakes. But despite being good on paper, I can't see myself recommending someone try this, even if they happened to already own both a Ferrari and a boat.

Now for something more opinionated: Nowadays, I find ECC RAM to be an unnecessary expense in systems where data integrity isn't absolutely crucial and where there isn't time to do a 2nd redundancy batch for error checking. Standard RAM just isn't that unreliable, especially if you're not overclocking (which you shouldn't be doing with professional applications). These APUs are awkwardly placed when it comes to professional applications - the GPUs are either tremendously overkill, or, underwhelming enough where ECC RAM is an odd priority. To me, it makes more sense to buy a non-G CPU (with ECC support) and buy a discrete Quadro or Firepro with ECC, or, just deal with the fact that ECC probably isn't necessary for your workload. Like I said though, this is all just an opinion, so I don't expect you or starshipeleven to agree. However, I would have to agree with his point that due to the inflated RAM prices, ECC is relatively a better value.