Memory often comes with lifetime guarantees. If they had ECC it would be much easier to detect bad memory...
ECC matters
61–70 of 567 posts
Re: ECC matters
#62“ECC availability matters a lot - exactly because Intel has been instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with it's horribly bad market segmentation.” Its. There, I finally corrected Linus Torvalds in something. :))
Maybe he composed the message using a machine with non-ECC RAM and suffered a bit flip, which through some chain of events, led to the ' being added. Best to give him the benefit of doubt, I think!
Re: ECC matters
#63For those, like me, wondering what ECC is, here's an explanation:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ecc-memory-ram-glossary...
Re: ECC matters
#64I beg this, every time this conversation comes up it’s the same answer “I don’t see a problem”. It’s so easy to chalk these kind of errors to other issues, a little corruption here, a running program goes bezerk there- could be a buggy program or a little accidental memory overwrite. Reboot will fix it. But I ran many thousands of physical machines, petabytes of RAM, I tracked memory flip errors and they were _common…
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Re: ECC matters
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
A system on Earth, at sea level, with 4 GB of RAM has a 96% percent chance of having a bit error in three days without ECC RAM. With ECC RAM, that goes down to 1.67e-10 or about one chance in six billions. So I'd say ECC is not only important but insanely impactful. There's a reason why many organizations don't even want to hear about getting rigs with non-ECC memory.
Could you measure altitude with memory?
That’s a very interesting idea, and I think you totally could. You run some benchmarks, measure the bit flips, and after enough runs you’d be able to say with a degree of confidence what your altitude is. I wonder though what accuracy could be achieved with this?
Re: ECC matters
#66I beg this, every time this conversation comes up it’s the same answer “I don’t see a problem”. It’s so easy to chalk these kind of errors to other issues, a little corruption here, a running program goes bezerk there- could be a buggy program or a little accidental memory overwrite. Reboot will fix it. But I ran many thousands of physical machines, petabytes of RAM, I tracked memory flip errors and they were _common…
Yeah, it's real obnoxious of Intel to silo ECC support off into the Xeon line, isn't it? I switched to ECC memory in 2013 or 2014 with a Xeon E3 (fundamentally a Core i7 without the ECC support fused off) and of course a Xeon-supporting motherboard (with weird "server board" quirks: e.g., no on-board sound device). I love that AMD doesn't intentionally break ECC on its consumer desktop platforms and upgraded to the T…
I've considered using an AMD CPU instead of Intel's Xeon on the primary desktop computer, but even low-end Ryzen Threadripper CPUs have TDP of 180W, which is a bit higher than I'd like. And though ECC is not disabled in Ryzen CPUs, AFAIK it's not tested in (or advertised for) those, so one won't be able to return/replace a CPU if it doesn't work with ECC memory, AIUI, making it risky. Though I don't know how common it is for ECC to not be handled properly in an otherwise functioning CPU; are there any statistics or estimates around?
Re: ECC matters
#67I would also add that Row Hammer Attacks are much harder on ECC.
When I first tried to replicate the row hammer attack I was not getting any results. Turns out I was doing this on ECC. On non ECC memory the same test easily replicated the row hammer attack.
Re: ECC matters
#68There was a great defcon talk a while back regarding using ECC. The concept was called "dns jitter" Basically you can register domains using small bit differences for domains and start getting email and such for that domain If I recall correctly the example given was a variation of microsoft.com All because so much equipment doesn't use ECC
Re: ECC matters
#69I simply care that my computer executes code perfectly. Let's settle on "one instance of unintended behaviour per hundred years" for that metric. If it needs ECC memory to do that, then fit it with ECC memory. If there are other ways to achieve that (for example deeper dram cells to be more robust to cosmic rays) that's fine too. Just meet the reliability spec - I don't care how.
Then you'll have to pay a huge primer for that privilege. I can assure you that your standard computer components are not rated for century-scale use. That's why I've always been on the fence with this ECC thing. For servers it's vital because you need stability and security. For desktops I think that for a long time it was fine without ECC. If I have to chose between having, say, 30% more RAM or avoid a potential cr…
But it isn't just a crash, it's also silent data corruption that will never be detected
Re: ECC matters
#70I used to be pretty skeptical of ECC for consumer-grade hardware, mainly because I felt that I'd always prefer cheaper/more RAM over ECC RAM even if it meant that I'd get a couple of crash every year due to rogue bitflips. For servers it's a different story, but for a desktop I'm fine dealing with some instability for better performance. But these days with the RAM density being so high and bitflipping attacks being…
Are there any Ryzen boards that support ECC and actually correct errors ?