Right now, I think nobody at Intel has any idea what's going on. Hell, we have an Ivy Bridge showing ECC enabled a few comments up.
And that is the *whole* damn problem with this. There is no definitive way to prove that the memory controller is actually operating in some kind of "ECC enabled" mode. That script just reads some bits and spits out the output. What those bits mean has to be interpreted. Until now the "meat world" has interpreted those bits as being ECC or non-ECC. But I've never liked or wanted to trust that validation because it didn't come "from Intel directly". I've trusted it because that's what everyone else in the IT industry trusted. But I still didn't like it. Not one bit.
What makes this all fugly as hell is that even if you look at my system (X9SCM-F, DDR3 with ECC, and Xeon E31230v2) is that I cannot prove that in my hardware setup (firmware versions, bios versions, etc.) I have no way of experimentally or programmatically proving for
100% certainty that I *am* actually using ECC. It been one of those things that I've always said 'Intel probably didn't screw this up and Supermicro hopefully didn't screw this up" so I've gone with it. If Supermicro made a mistake with their BIOS and broke ECC nobody would be any wiser until we had an actual real-world example. Even if we did, how do you prove for 100% certainty it was the motherboard and that it wasn't because the motherboard was bad, or a manufacturing defect from day one? I could think up a million scenarios where you could think you have ECC and yet not have ECC. I'm a skeptic like that and I like to be able to prove things for certainty. This is one thing that nobody has ever been able to prove, for certainty. You can get reasonably close by buying high-end stuff like Supermicro boards, Xeons, and ECC RAM.
In fact, a scenario like the one I just explained above where a BIOS mistake or a problem with the CPU might never be known is why I advocated so strongly against Asrock Rack when it first came out. They're new to the market and even more likely to make a mistake than Supermicro is because they are new. Do *you* want to trust your data to a company based solely on their reputation (or lackthereof with Asrock Rack)? I don't.
And don't even bring AMD into this conversation. Anyone using AMD is even more clueless as to how to validate ECC is working than Intel without drastic measures! LOL
So you have:
AMD which is strictly what some company says they can support on a sheet of paper.
Intel which is strictly what some company says they can support on a sheet of paper, but because of their higher market share and therefore a larger userbase, it would be
slightly easier to prove that ECC doesn't work if there was some kind of problem. But considering that i3s don't have ECC support and we're finding out a couple of years later, is that "slightly" easier mean that instead of being 0% chance its now "just a fraction above zero" and therefore still meaningless?
We all know how much faith we can put on a sheet of paper too....
The bottom line, you should be buying products from reputable companies that have a very vested interest in having full support for ECC. And you should be buying products that end up in large corporations that use that hardware that way you are somewhat protected by the herd of people relying on the same technology you are. That is... if you are neurotic about file servers and actually want validation that you aren't the lone wolf on the island with major problems. ;)