True. I've wondered the same thing, and always come back to inexpensive Ryzens on ASRock motherboards that I simply underclock.
The problem with those inexpensive Ryzens is that they don't have iGPUs with Intel QuickSync so they can't transcode video with high efficiency. This makes them unsuitable for use for media servers, which is what a lot of people are doing with these chips these days: building home NAS/media servers that combine both functions into a single, small, low-power unit. You put a bunch of HDDs in it so you can store tens of…
Doesn't AMD make Ryzens that also have iGPUs that work with jellyfin/plex transcoding?
There are lots of people out there saying to get one of these low(er) power Intel systems instead of, say, an Orange Pi 5 or some other ARM machine, but I think some of the information from the comments tells us a little more about their suitability for certain applications: "In fact ‘whole systems’ were benchmarked and not just Intel CPUs (under identical environmental conditions) since as we know in the meantime on…
Why do we never see such cheap, low-wattage CPUs with ECC memory controllers? There’s absolutely a market for these, starting with home NAS and generic servers. I just don’t get it, such a missed opportunity here!
Intel uses ECC as a differentiator between consumer chips and server chips (and pro-sumer?)
They’d never do that.
They SHOULD. Everyone had too much memory and it’s too dense. We should all have ECC by now.
Unless AMD does it I don’t think it will happen. Even if they do I feel like OEMs wouldn’t want it because memory would suddenly cost 2¢ per GB (or whatever) and refuse.
We're kind of stumbling into a golden age of home NAS devices and while there aren't any ready-to-go ECC options yet, you can buy lovely little cases to support your own components. I think we'll surely see ECC in the next generation of AOOSTAR and similar devices, nobody making these devices has any motivation to never implement ECC.
How exactly are companies like AOOSTAR going to implement ECC if it's not supported by the CPU vendor (which is Intel)? AMD CPUs are useless for these home NAS devices if your goal is to build a low-power media server, which I think is one of the main use-cases (why else would you want to store tens of terabytes of data at home?).
The very old HP Microserver Gen7's used a low power AMD cpu, as did the original Gen10 model.
The Gen7 things would never be useful for transcoding on cpu though, waaaaaay too underpowered.
But they did have a PCIe slot for add-in cards (ie small gpu or network card).
The problem with those inexpensive Ryzens is that they don't have iGPUs with Intel QuickSync so they can't transcode video with high efficiency. This makes them unsuitable for use for media servers, which is what a lot of people are doing with these chips these days: building home NAS/media servers that combine both functions into a single, small, low-power unit. You put a bunch of HDDs in it so you can store tens of…
Doesn't AMD make Ryzens that also have iGPUs that work with jellyfin/plex transcoding?
From what I've read, the AMD offerings here are not at all competitive with Intel's QuickSync.
How exactly are companies like AOOSTAR going to implement ECC if it's not supported by the CPU vendor (which is Intel)? AMD CPUs are useless for these home NAS devices if your goal is to build a low-power media server, which I think is one of the main use-cases (why else would you want to store tens of terabytes of data at home?).
The very old HP Microserver Gen7's used a low power AMD cpu, as did the original Gen10 model. The Gen7 things would never be useful for transcoding on cpu though, waaaaaay too underpowered. But they did have a PCIe slot for add-in cards (ie small gpu or network card).
Of course you can add a GPU card on the PCIe slot, but this 1) takes away a slot, and PCIe lanes, that you might want to use for connecting storage devices (such as a SATA HBA card), and 2) this will probably poorly affect your system's overall power consumption, which is a big factor for home users building NAS/media server boxes. Intel's QuickSync performs extremely well, with very low power (esp at idle) for 4k transcoding, for very low cost, while not needing any PCIe lanes; it's why these CPUs are so popular for this application. Unfortunately, Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips, so that's a big drawback, as ECC is really useful for a storage server (or really anywhere).
Why do we never see such cheap, low-wattage CPUs with ECC memory controllers? There’s absolutely a market for these, starting with home NAS and generic servers. I just don’t get it, such a missed opportunity here!
Intel uses ECC as a differentiator between consumer chips and server chips (and pro-sumer?) They’d never do that. They SHOULD. Everyone had too much memory and it’s too dense. We should all have ECC by now. Unless AMD does it I don’t think it will happen. Even if they do I feel like OEMs wouldn’t want it because memory would suddenly cost 2¢ per GB (or whatever) and refuse.
AMD does it in their embedded low-voltage CPUs, which are not easy to be found in regular applications. V2000 and V3000 series have 10W TDP versions.
The very old HP Microserver Gen7's used a low power AMD cpu, as did the original Gen10 model. The Gen7 things would never be useful for transcoding on cpu though, waaaaaay too underpowered. But they did have a PCIe slot for add-in cards (ie small gpu or network card).
Of course you can add a GPU card on the PCIe slot, but this 1) takes away a slot, and PCIe lanes, that you might want to use for connecting storage devices (such as a SATA HBA card), and 2) this will probably poorly affect your system's overall power consumption, which is a big factor for home users building NAS/media server boxes. Intel's QuickSync performs extremely well, with very low power (esp at idle) for 4k tr…
> Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips
They at least used to support ECC on some models of i3 chips as well.
My understanding was that was specifically to support ECC on lower power NAS systems.
Why do we never see such cheap, low-wattage CPUs with ECC memory controllers? There’s absolutely a market for these, starting with home NAS and generic servers. I just don’t get it, such a missed opportunity here!
Intel uses ECC as a differentiator between consumer chips and server chips (and pro-sumer?) They’d never do that. They SHOULD. Everyone had too much memory and it’s too dense. We should all have ECC by now. Unless AMD does it I don’t think it will happen. Even if they do I feel like OEMs wouldn’t want it because memory would suddenly cost 2¢ per GB (or whatever) and refuse.
Intel actually did add ECC in their Atoms, see C3000 for example:
Of course you can add a GPU card on the PCIe slot, but this 1) takes away a slot, and PCIe lanes, that you might want to use for connecting storage devices (such as a SATA HBA card), and 2) this will probably poorly affect your system's overall power consumption, which is a big factor for home users building NAS/media server boxes. Intel's QuickSync performs extremely well, with very low power (esp at idle) for 4k tr…
> Intel stupidly refuses to allow ECC support on non-Xeon chips They at least used to support ECC on some models of i3 chips as well. My understanding was that was specifically to support ECC on lower power NAS systems. Random examples: • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/90729/i... (6th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97455/i... (7th gen i3) • https://ark.intel.com/c…
It looks like these CPUs were specifically targeted at embedded devices; they aren't things you can normally purchase yourself easily like the regular desktop chips, and if you look at the desktop variants (the ones without any letter suffixes), they don't support ECC.