Why don’t PCs use error correcting RAM? “Because Intel,” says Linus
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Re: Why don’t PCs use error correcting RAM? “Because Intel,” says Linus
#2Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25622322
Re: Why don’t PCs use error correcting RAM? “Because Intel,” says Linus
#3I absolutely love that Linus speaks his mind. Candor and telling it honestly is getting rarer...
Re: Why don’t PCs use error correcting RAM? “Because Intel,” says Linus
#4Interesting. Looking online, it seems AMD's desktop-grade Ryzen line supports ECC, although motherboard ECC support is still somewhat rare. Yet another reason to prefer AMD these days I guess. This reddit comment has more info on Ryzen ECC support: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ggmyyg/an_overview_of_...
Re: Why don’t PCs use error correcting RAM? “Because Intel,” says Linus
#5While I don't think he should be flipping the bird, his technical arguments are absolutely spot on.
An aside question for readers: How often does RAM error, and is it a significant problem in practice?
I don't have any direct experience with this (that I could tell) using consumer computers for the past 15-odd years of programming.
Re: Why don’t PCs use error correcting RAM? “Because Intel,” says Linus
#6While I don't think he should be flipping the bird, his technical arguments are absolutely spot on. An aside question for readers: How often does RAM error, and is it a significant problem in practice? I don't have any direct experience with this (that I could tell) using consumer computers for the past 15-odd years of programming.
That photo is from him saying "fuck you" to NVIDIA back in 2012: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus...
FTA: "Bit flips can happen for many reasons, beginning with cosmic-ray impact or simple hardware failure. A large-scale study[0] of Google servers found that roughly 32 percent of all servers (and 8 percent of all DIMMs) in Google's fleet experience at least one memory error per year. But the vast majority of these are single-bit errors—and since Google is using server CPUs and ECC RAM, this means the machines in question keep right on trucking."
[0] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf
Re: Why don’t PCs use error correcting RAM? “Because Intel,” says Linus
#7I absolutely love that Linus speaks his mind. Candor and telling it honestly is getting rarer...
Unfortunately, "candor and telling it honestly" is frequently code for "I want to be hostile toward people I don't like, but I don't want to experience social consequences for it", so there's a lot of noise in the interpretation of this space.
Re: Why don’t PCs use error correcting RAM? “Because Intel,” says Linus
#8While I don't think he should be flipping the bird, his technical arguments are absolutely spot on. An aside question for readers: How often does RAM error, and is it a significant problem in practice? I don't have any direct experience with this (that I could tell) using consumer computers for the past 15-odd years of programming.
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Re: Why don’t PCs use error correcting RAM? “Because Intel,” says Linus
#9Given the current RAM and disk sizes, and how much we put trust on computers, every cell phone or computer should use ECC RAM and checksummed filesystems these days.
Re: Why don’t PCs use error correcting RAM? “Because Intel,” says Linus
#10Makes me think how many blue screens/crashes I've experienced over the years on my desktop could have been avoided by ECC. On a global level, think of all of that time & productivity lost due to an arbitrary policy/penny pinching.