ECC RAM should be a human right • Hacker News Board

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#31

Post by dale_glass » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 10:51 PM UTC

jjtheblunt wrote: post #15

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 ?

I think it's mostly pointless in this day and age.

I'm just saying that it has a potential appeal for gamers too, so it's not just a datacenter type of technology that some nerds want to play with.

At the very least it'd make overclocking safer and easier, so any manufacturer making gamer type boards with a lot of overclocking settings in the BIOS should like the idea of it.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#32

Post by p1mrx » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 10:51 PM UTC

RealityVoid wrote: post #12

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 inclu…

You're talking about overclocking the CPU. ECC is more relevant when overclocking the RAM itself, which also affects gaming performance.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#33

Post by loeg » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 10:54 PM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #19

phkahler wrote: post #4

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

Why is that?

DDR5 will have some minimal ECC on the stick but critically does not mandate full runs to the CPU. Or in Wikipedia's words:

> Unlike DDR4, all DDR5 chips have on-die ECC, where errors are detected and corrected before sending data to the CPU. This, however, is not the same as true ECC memory with an extra data correction chip on the memory module. DDR5's on-die error correction is to improve reliability and to allow denser RAM chips which lowers the per-chip defect rate. There still exist non-ECC and ECC DDR5 DIMM variants; the ECC variants have extra data lines to the CPU to send error-detection data, letting the CPU detect and correct errors that occurred in transit.

So in some ways it is better than previous generations, but it gives vendors another excuse not to implement full-coverage ECC. That's my guess of why GP said it complicates things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR5_SDRAM

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#34

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

RealityVoid wrote: post #12

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 inclu…

They specifically mean overclocking the memory.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#35

Post by Retric » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #29

adhoc32 wrote: post #25

Latest Intel desktop CPUs (i.e. i9-13900KF) supports ECC with the W680 chipset.

One of the main reasons I buy Xeon desktops is the ECC. With 128 GB of memory, and 1 bitflip/GB/year average error rate, it seems too risky to not use ECC for production work.

Real world numbers are closer to 1 bitflip/GB/hour than year because bit flips are highly correlated.

“A large-scale study based on Google's very large number of servers was presented at the SIGMETRICS/Performance '09 conference.[6] The actual error rate found was several orders of magnitude higher than the previous small-scale or laboratory studies, with between 25,000 (2.5 × 10−11 error/bit·h) and 70,000 (7.0 × 10−11 error/bit·h, or 1 bit error per gigabyte of RAM per 1.8 hours) errors per billion device hours per megabit. More than 8% of DIMM memory modules were affected by errors per year.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory

A random stick of non ECC memory might be far above average or have several errors per minute, but you just don’t know.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#36

Post by LanternLight83 » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

I'm with you, but it's worth noting that errant bit-flips are also the most convincing argument for vertically integrated file-systems like ZFS and BTRFS.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#37

Post by coder543 » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 10:57 PM UTC

skunkworker wrote: post #30

adhoc32 wrote: post #25

Latest Intel desktop CPUs (i.e. i9-13900KF) supports ECC with the W680 chipset.

I wish those motherboards didn't cost $450+, I've contemplated building a home server with a 13th gen + ECC because you also get quicksync onboard.

Exactly. $450 for a motherboard just to get ECC support is ridiculous. I don't know how it is with AM5, but on AM4, my understanding is that you could use ECC memory with many normally-priced motherboards. (Even if it wasn't "officially" supported.)

Mentioning W680 feels pointless. You've always been able to buy high-end workstation-class motherboards and stick ECC in them. The entire point of the article is that all computers should be using ECC RAM, not just the expensive, workstation class computers.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#38

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

adhoc32 wrote: post #25

Latest Intel desktop CPUs (i.e. i9-13900KF) supports ECC with the W680 chipset.

It's worth keeping in mind that the chipset has zero involvement in ECC. The CPU is directly attached to the memory slots. They're using the chipset as an expensive dongle.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#39

Post by theandrewbailey » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 10:59 PM UTC

thinking001001 wrote: post #20

Digital privacy should be a human right. ECC RAM is just another iteration.

These things are not comparable.

Re: ECC RAM should be a human right

#40

Post by laweijfmvo » Sat, Jan 21, 2023, 11:04 PM UTC

I've never had ECC memory to my knowledge. What have I been missing out on, in practice? Can we confidently say that x% of my past BSOD were the direct consequence?