ECC and DDR5
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ECC and DDR5
1–10 of 162 posts
Re: ECC and DDR5
#2Interesting article, and I agree that ECC needs to be more widely available. But I think this is a major overreach:
> We need ECC RAM to be more widely used. Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data and lost time due to RAM hardware errors. I think that at minimum we need sufficient taxes on non-ECC RAM (and EC4 RAM for DDR5) to make it more expensive when bought new than ECC RAM.
ECC RAM is not needed for every application and mandating it for every gaming rig and machine used to run Chrome will just increase prices unnecessarily. 99% of the time it's also not a "cost to society" but a cost to whoever owns/uses that machine. If they want to eat that cost, it should be up to them.
Re: ECC and DDR5
#3Something important not discussed here is that you need not only error correction (when possible) but also error reporting, so you can know you RAM is failing. Sadly, is not possible to get DDR5 on-die ECC error counts reported to the OS. Alternative solution, use IBECC with DDR5, where the CPU reserves a portion of the RAM for parity bits and does the check / reporting.
Re: ECC and DDR5
#4The problem I have with ECC discussions is that it’s always anecdotal. There is one Google study finding memory flips with some probability in their datacenters, but it was awhile ago. Everyone repeats the statement DDR5 on-die ECC isn’t a replacement for regular ECC, but nobody ever shows data on DDR5 bitflips. That’s not a knock on this article per se, but it’d be nice to have actual data here.
Re: ECC and DDR5
#5Got ECC udimm for my ddr4 server and was surprised to see it picking up errors occasionally (once every couple months). Likely from a weakness in one of the sticks. This far it’s always corrected it though so opted to keep them anyway (nobody wants to be minus 32gb in these trying memory times)
With normal sticks I’d not have know that there is a potential issue.
Re: ECC and DDR5
#6Interesting article, and I agree that ECC needs to be more widely available. But I think this is a major overreach: > We need ECC RAM to be more widely used. Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data and lost time due to RAM hardware errors. I think that at minimum we need sufficient taxes on non-ECC RAM (and EC4 RAM for DDR5) to make it more expens…
> ECC RAM is not needed for every application and mandating it for every gaming rig and machine used to run Chrome will just increase prices unnecessarily.
The price increase will be very small if manufacturers are no longer able to segment the market to make a higher margin on those who need it. No one wants even games or web browsers to crash randomly.
> If they want to eat that cost, it should be up to them.
They need to be given the choice. Most people do not know they even have the choice, and they are not offered it at a reasonable price.
A cost to people in general is a cost to society.
Re: ECC and DDR5
#716GB ECC DDR5 was $50 early 2025
it is now $500
when the AI/datacenter bubble finally bursts we are going to have some amazing hardware deals
Re: ECC and DDR5
#8"Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data"
Why is it so often Australia with the "We must force unnecessary things upon people" attitude?
Re: ECC and DDR5
#9Interesting article, and I agree that ECC needs to be more widely available. But I think this is a major overreach: > We need ECC RAM to be more widely used. Ideally we would have some government action to force this given the ongoing cost to society in corrupted data and lost time due to RAM hardware errors. I think that at minimum we need sufficient taxes on non-ECC RAM (and EC4 RAM for DDR5) to make it more expens…
> ECC RAM is not needed for every application and mandating it for every gaming rig and machine used to run Chrome will just increase prices unnecessarily. The price increase will be very small if manufacturers are no longer able to segment the market to make a higher margin on those who need it. No one wants even games or web browsers to crash randomly. > If they want to eat that cost, it should be up to them. They…
Without quantifying the cost to society that someone's web-browser crashes sometimes, it's hard to make a rational case that this issue is so dire that it needs specific regulation.
I'm not sure making it illegal to sell consumer grade hardware is the boon for the people you imagine
Re: ECC and DDR5
#10The problem I have with ECC discussions is that it’s always anecdotal. There is one Google study finding memory flips with some probability in their datacenters, but it was awhile ago. Everyone repeats the statement DDR5 on-die ECC isn’t a replacement for regular ECC, but nobody ever shows data on DDR5 bitflips. That’s not a knock on this article per se, but it’d be nice to have actual data here.
>> Everyone repeats the statement DDR5 on-die ECC isn’t a replacement for regular ECC, but nobody ever shows data on DDR5 bitflips.
That's because the on-die ECC cannot detect errors in the transmission of data from the DIMMs to the CPU. It seems like on-die ECC is meant to "hide" some level of errors to make less reliable RAM chips appear good. I have no idea if that's a reasonable way to do it, but it seems like it could be misused. Like TFA suggests, we need to know how the two levels of ECC interact.