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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

#11

Post by ilyt »

p1necone wrote: post #8
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.

Entirely depends on error rate

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#12

Post by RealityVoid »

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…

I doubt that would actually be useful with overclocking. I don't know the arch of the modern PC well enough to say with 100% confidence, but on embedded arches, the RAM has the parity bits checked when they get placed on the bus. If the error happens on data retrieval(or was already present) , then the ECC saves you, but if it happen anywhere else... not really? I don't know if.. ALU's for example automatically include the parity bits in the computation.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#13

Post by MBCook »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #5

Still wild to me we lost ECC RAM. It used to be standard in PCs. Does Apple hardware come with ECC RAM? If anyone could make it make sense as a business, it's them.

When was it standard? It’s been the high-end extra thing for as long as I can remember.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#15

Post by jjtheblunt »

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…

totally embarrassingly naive question : why bother overclocking ?

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#17

Post by Felger »

MBCook wrote: post #13
NelsonMinar wrote: post #5

Still wild to me we lost ECC RAM. It used to be standard in PCs. Does Apple hardware come with ECC RAM? If anyone could make it make sense as a business, it's them.

When was it standard? It’s been the high-end extra thing for as long as I can remember.

I can remember 486 Motherboard in Packard Bell (quite the entry brand...) systems frequently used 36 bits ECC FP SIMMs.

Printers and plotters from this era used ECC modules most of the time.

But by the end of the century, they were replaced by unbuffered, unregistered 16/32/64 bits modules.

Every mid range server still use ECC. Entry HPE Servers use ECC UREG (unregistered, 9 chips) modules, while mid range and more use ECC REG modules (9 chip + interface controller onboard). Ironically, UREG module are more expensive than ECC REG.

Also, most workstations used ECC modules. Less frequently since 4-5 years.

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