7 ms·
The big one is ECC memory.
by jlawer 11y ago
The big one is ECC memory.
- tacticus 11y agoThere really is no good reason intel keep removing this from the consumer cpus.
- dgemm 11y agoMarket segmentation.
- staunch 11y agoYou can segment on anything, if you want, the question is whether ECC should be a standard in all computers. It probably should be.
- lewisl9029 11y agoECC does come at a cost of raw performance though. From a marketing perspective it might not be a good idea to introduce a feature that would cause performance regressions in a new product.
- xioxox 11y agoWhat cost is there? This benchmark shows almost the same performance for ECC memory: http://www.techspot.com/article/845-ddr3-ram-vs-ecc-memory/ http://www.techspot.com/article/845-ddr3-ram-vs-ecc-memory/
- kjs3 11y agoThere are all sorts of things that "should" be standard on all computers, but until the average consumer (non-technical, not HN reading) starts saying "I got to get me some ECC memory" it's not going to be something Intel cares about.
- xienze 11y agoThere really isn't a big price difference between an i7 and an E3. Most consumers don't need ECC memory. So, leave it out and charge less. If you need it, get the Xeon.
- cmurf 11y agoI disagree. The sheer volume of data being pushed these days even by consumer computers is enough to be occasionally affected by a bit flip. ECC is used in the cache memory found on the CPU itself, so it's been important at that level for a long time even on consumer products.
- 4ad 11y agoIt's amazing that after rowhammer people still think this.
- gcb0 11y agomy guess is that the ECC aspect is really a hit or miss on the waffer fabrication, that's why they have such a huge pool of the market without it. also that is why intel has 200 models of each CPU. they waste nothing that cames out of the oven there.
- dogma1138 11y agoMany server vendors are dropping ecc as the performance hit isn't worth the additional reliability in many cases. I don't see the point of ecc today for most applications also...
- justin66 11y ago> Many server vendors are dropping ecc as the performance hit isn't worth the additional reliability in many cases. Bullshit on both counts. (even the low-end Lenovo, HP and Dell servers I see sometimes on Slickdeals still have ECC, so what brands are you even talking about?)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- edoloughlin 11y agoBullshit on both counts Hey, how about keeping it civil and polite? It's been pretty good here for the last year, following a relentless drive to call out bad behaviour. It'd be a shame to see it backslide.
- 4ad 11y agoHow is his statement not civil and polite? Call a spade a spade, etc.
- justin66 11y agoI'm not sure if you're familiar with the idiom "calling bullshit" but I'm pretty confident it doesn't mean what you think it means. It is an old enough expression that an urban dictionary reference shouldn't be necessary, but here you go: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I+call+bullshit&defid=5686440 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=I+call+bullsh...
- edoloughlin 11y agoI'm not sure if you're familiar with the idiom "calling bullshit" I am familiar with it and, to me, it's rude. I might say it to a friend if we're just bantering, but I'd never say it to a colleague. Clearly, I'm in the minority here.
- rodgerd 11y agoSure there is - they cut the feature, and people still keep buying their CPUs in preference to the AMD ones which retain it. Since people obviously prefer speed to data integrity, why would Intel do anything different?
- k__ 11y agoI always used AMD cpus on my dekstops, so that's probably why I didn't even notice it. The last time I really looked into this stuff there was non-ECC, ECC and Rambus for servers.
- marcoperaza 11y agoMarket segmentation is a good thing. The minority of people that need workstation/server -level reliability pay a premium, while the average consumer gets to pay less. If they abandoned this practice, the typical consumer would pay a lot more.
- effie 11y agoDo you know some real case where ECC memory brought tangible benefits? It seems conventional memory chips are quite reliable.
- ggreer 11y agoBit errors have been used to hijack communications. Just register a bunch of domains that differ from popular ones by a single bit and watch the requests come in.[1] Typically, users don't recognize single bit errors. Something breaks and they think, "Stupid buggy software." With modern RAM capacities, you're pretty likely to get some bits flipped every few months. 1. http://dinaburg.org/bitsquatting.html http://dinaburg.org/bitsquatting.html
- comboy 11y ago> Typically, users don't recognize single bit errors. Something breaks and they think, "Stupid buggy software." With modern RAM capacities, you're pretty likely to get some bits flipped every few months. Supposedly much higher than that[1]. More like "5 single bit errors in 8 Gigabytes of RAM per hour using the top-end error rate" [2] 1. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory
- harshreality 11y agoMemory bit flips happen all the time—not like daily or weekly per computer, but you can have multiple memory bit flip incidents during the multi-year life of an average computer. Either you detect them, or you get silent data corruption. If you're lucky it's in unused ram; if you're not, it may be in running code (possible crash or software misbehavior) or data (in a text document, one corrupted character; in some other kind of data, it could be much worse). Think about how a bit flip in code or data can affect things like ciphertext generation. It can become a huge deal. Think of "bad ram" —the kind that fails memtest86— as ram that has an increased tendency (compared to "good ram") to flip certain bits that with a little more luck, or more conservative timings, wouldn't flip. The threshold between good ram and bad ram is not black and white. Also see "rowhammer" — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171722 — ECC mitigates that to a significant degree. Aggressive memory testing before use can weed out memory that's plain bad (one bit always screwing up), and certain borderline cases of memory that will flip bits under certain high stress loads or access patterns (I suppose that's due to thermal entropy?), but it's no guarantee, and it certainly offers no protection against cosmic ray induced bit flips, which happen too. Ordinary consumer memory is not "quite reliable" if you care about data integrity or stability. Google's study: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub35162.html http://research.google.com/pubs/pub35162.html (direct pdf link: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/35162.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... )
- drewg123 11y agoThe lack of ECC in consumer grade CPUs is irritating, because when AMD was viable, they had ECC support in most of their CPUs (but you had to make sure the motherboard supported it). You could use a random AMD CPU + a motherboard supporting ECC & be sure of your data integrity. These days I pay the "server" tax on the machines I build, buying Xeons just to get ECC. If they supported ECC, a normal i5 / i7 would probably be plenty, and the build would be less of a PITA as there would be more and cheaper motherboard choices with workstation basics like audio on board. And yes, I use ZFS, and am otherwise pretty paranoid..
- dman 11y agoThe suitability of i5/i7 for most workloads hasnt gone unnoticed at Intel. I expect future i5/i7 to be gimped with respect to IO connectivity to ensure that people doing real computation continue to pay the Xeon tax. For reference see the bits about pcie lanes at http://semiaccurate.com/2015/08/05/intel-plays-press-skylake-stupidity/ http://semiaccurate.com/2015/08/05/intel-plays-press-skylake... . Another place where this shows up is the AVX 512 fiasco where AVX 512 is missing from consumer chips. Intel has some of the best engineers in the world and make exceptional products. I wish the beancounters at Intel were a bit less into market segmentation.
- Retr0spectrum 11y agoIf you don't mind buying slightly old and power hungry stuff, server grade hardware is actually much cheaper. 24GB DDR2 ECC RAM - £16 (I was VERY lucky to get this one) 2x Xeon X5450 - £22 Intel S5000PALR Motherboard - £30 These specs are roughly equivalent to a 2008 mac pro, which costs around £500.
- bkjelden 11y agoWhat benefits does ECC provide to consumer use cases?
- coldtea 11y agoLess crashes, better security and no corrupted data written to disk from memory. Who said consumer use cases are OK with those?