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ECC RAM should be a human right

dmitrybrant.com

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Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#3

Post by PaulKeeble »

ECC has been used as an artificial market segmentation mechanism for a long time and it needs to come to an end. RAM just like SSDs and HDDs ought to have some amount of self protection against basic errors, all places where data is stored even for short periods needs this.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#6

Post by dale_glass »

ECC RAM would actually be a boon to everyone, including gamers.

ECC means not only that you know precisely when you've gone too far with overclocking, but potentially allows overclocking a bit further, relying on that some amount of trouble can now be tolerated.

It also means you're not going to break your OS by playing with this stuff. Memory corruption carries a huge risk of disk corruption, which can mean things like corrupt data, random crashes or an unbootable system that persists even after reverting everything to defaults.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#7

Post by zdw »

phkahler wrote: post #4

Unfortunately DDR5 is going to complicate rather than fix the story.

It's very strange that DDR5 mandates internal ECC within each physical package, but not on the longer and possibly more EMI sensitive connections between the memory chips and controller.

I would have thought that the additional cost would be minimal (additional wiring on the logic board in some cases), but maybe this is just more artificial market segmentation?

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#8

Post by p1necone »

dale_glass wrote: post #6

ECC RAM would actually be a boon to everyone, including gamers. ECC means not only that you know precisely when you've gone too far with overclocking, but potentially allows overclocking a bit further, relying on that some amount of trouble can now be tolerated. It also means you're not going to break your OS by playing with this stuff. Memory corruption carries a huge risk of disk corruption, which can mean things l…

The sweet spot for overclocking ECC ram is still before it starts malfunctioning. If it's clocked higher but is correcting for errors it will still be slower.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#9

Post by ilyt »

zdw wrote: post #7
phkahler wrote: post #4

Unfortunately DDR5 is going to complicate rather than fix the story.

It's very strange that DDR5 mandates internal ECC within each physical package, but not on the longer and possibly more EMI sensitive connections between the memory chips and controller. I would have thought that the additional cost would be minimal (additional wiring on the logic board in some cases), but maybe this is just more artificial market segmentation?

They have internal ECC coz that allows them to have higher yields, what could be considered faulty chip in DDR4 can be now sold in DDR5. So it is effectively cost-reducing measure for them. Exposing that to the user not only would cost extra pennies, but potentially have uses go "hey, this stick is shit, look at how many correctable errors it is producing, please replace it"
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